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• Puppet gives SSL error because master is not running?

  - by Daniel Huger

  I started with two clean machines this time. My master is running 12.04 Version: 2.7.11-1ubuntu2 Depends: ruby1.8, puppetmaster-common (= 2.7.11-1ubuntu2) My client is 10.04 Version: 2.6.3-0ubuntu1~lucid1 Depends: puppet-common (= 2.6.3-0ubuntu1~lucid1), ruby1.8 To setup Puppet tutorial: http://shapeshed.com/setting-up-puppet-on-ubuntu-10-04/ To connect master and client: http://shapeshed.com/connecting-clients-to-a-puppet-master/ The first time I tried to connect master to client failed with SSL_connect error. So I did rm -rf /etc/puppet/ssl/ to remove all the keys inside ssl folders. It looked like it work.... BUT client# puppet agent --server puppet --waitforce 60 --test /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/facter/util/resolution.rb:46: warning: Insecure world writable dir /etc/condor in PATH, mode 040777 /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/puppet/defaults.rb:67: warning: Insecure world writable dir /etc/condor in PATH, mode 040777 info: Creating a new SSL key for giab10 warning: peer certificate won't be verified in this SSL session info: Caching certificate for ca warning: peer certificate won't be verified in this SSL session warning: peer certificate won't be verified in this SSL session info: Creating a new SSL certificate request for mybox123 info: Certificate Request fingerprint (md5): XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX warning: peer certificate won't be verified in this SSL session warning: peer certificate won't be verified in this SSL session warning: peer certificate won't be verified in this SSL session warning: peer certificate won't be verified in this SSL session info: Caching certificate for mybox123 err: Could not retrieve catalog from remote server: SSL_connect returned=1 errno=0 state=SSLv3 read server certificate B: certificate verify failed warning: Not using cache on failed catalog It cached but then it couldn't retrieve it. Let me stop here.... worrying I would mess something up. But let's check master's status. * master is not running WoW.... ??? master# service puppetmaster start * Starting puppet master [OK] master# service puppetmaster status * master is not running I think time is sync. Well, we are behind a firewall so the port to sync time is disbaled. I checked with date and they seem okay. What about master not running? Is that the cause? Any help is appreciated. Thanks! /var/lib/puppet/log/masterhttp.log [2012-06-30 00:13:25] INFO WEBrick 1.3.1 [2012-06-30 00:13:25] INFO ruby 1.8.7 (2011-06-30) [x86_64-linux] [2012-06-30 00:13:25] WARN TCPServer Error: Address already in use - bind(2) [2012-06-30 00:19:40] INFO WEBrick 1.3.1 [2012-06-30 00:19:40] INFO ruby 1.8.7 (2011-06-30) [x86_64-linux] [2012-06-30 00:19:40] WARN TCPServer Error: Address already in use - bind(2) [2012-06-30 00:28:58] INFO WEBrick 1.3.1 [2012-06-30 00:28:58] INFO ruby 1.8.7 (2011-06-30) [x86_64-linux] [2012-06-30 00:28:58] WARN TCPServer Error: Address already in use - bind(2) [2012-06-30 15:31:25] INFO WEBrick 1.3.1 [2012-06-30 15:31:25] INFO ruby 1.8.7 (2011-06-30) [x86_64-linux] [2012-06-30 15:31:25] WARN TCPServer Error: Address already in use - bind(2) 1 S puppet 5186 1 0 80 0 - 29410 poll_s 15:44 ? 00:00:00 /usr/bin/ruby1.8 /usr/bin/puppet master --masterport=8140 4 S root 5235 5005 0 80 0 - 2344 pipe_w 15:45 pts/0 00:00:00 grep --color=auto puppet kill -9 5186 puppet master service puppetmaster status * master is not running I always have this error, but I always ignored it. http://pastebin.com/exbpArjv What could it mean? Time sync? Package not installed? Then how could we do puppetca in the first place?

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• Trouble getting SSL to work with django + nginx + wsgi

  - by Kevin

  I've followed a couple of examples for Django + nginx + wsgi + ssl, but I can't get them to work. I simply get an error in my browser than I can't connect. I'm running two websites off the host. The config files are identical except for the ip addresses, server names, and directories. When neither use SSL, they work fine. When I try to listen on 443 with one of them, I can't connect to either. My config files are below, and any suggestions would be appreciated. server{ listen xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:80; server_name sub.domain.com; access_log /home/django/logs/nginx_customerdb_http_access.log; error_log /home/django/logs/nginx_customerdb_http_error.log; location / { proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080; proxy_redirect off; proxy_set_header Host $host; proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; client_max_body_size 10m; client_body_buffer_size 128k; proxy_connect_timeout 90; proxy_send_timeout 90; proxy_read_timeout 90; proxy_buffers 32 4k; } location /site_media/ { alias /home/django/customerdb_site_media/; } location /admin-media/ { alias /home/django/django_admin_media/; } } server{ listen xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:443; server_name sub.domain.com; access_log /home/django/logs/nginx_customerdb_http_access.log; error_log /home/django/logs/nginx_customerdb_http_error.log; ssl on; ssl_certificate sub.domain.com.crt; ssl_certificate_key sub.domain.com.key; ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on; location / { proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080; proxy_redirect off; proxy_set_header Host $host; proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Protocol https; client_max_body_size 10m; client_body_buffer_size 128k; proxy_connect_timeout 90; proxy_send_timeout 90; proxy_read_timeout 90; proxy_buffers 32 4k; } location /site_media/ { alias /home/django/customerdb_site_media/; } location /admin-media/ { alias /home/django/django_admin_media/; } } <VirtualHost *:8080> ServerName xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx ServerAlias xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx LogLevel warn ErrorLog /home/django/logs/apache_customerdb_error.log CustomLog /home/django/logs/apache_customerdb_access.log combined WSGIScriptAlias / /home/django/customerdb/apache/django.wsgi WSGIDaemonProcess customerdb_wsgi processes=4 threads=5 WSGIProcessGroup customerdb_wsgi SetEnvIf X-Forwarded-Protocol "^https$" HTTPS=on </VirtualHost> UDPATE: the existence of two sites (on separate IPs) on the host is the issue. if i delete the other site, the setting above mostly work. doing so also brings up another issue: chrome doesn't accept the site as secure saying that some content is not encrypted.

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• BluRay audio/video stuttering with PowerDVD 11, WinDVD 11 Pro, etc? Xonar/Auzen HD audio option?

  - by jrista

  I recently upgraded my Windows 7 MediaCenter HTPC due to a motherboard failure (really old motherboard and cpu, it was on its last legs.) I chose to upgrade to an i5 system with everything built into the motherboard. I did my due diligence, researched, and found some hardware that was within my budget. I ended up with: Core i5 2500K (3.3Ghz) Corsair XMS3 2x2Gb DDR3 (4Gb) ASUS P8H 61-M LE/CSM MicroCenter 64Gb SSD (Previous BluRay player, forget the brand) The system is pretty awesome, and plays everything I have perfectly. I almost went with an Atom solution, however there have been numerous notes that they do not play NetFlix Instant Watch well...and I am a heavy Netflix IW user. High definition BluRay rips work well, although they usually contain lower audio quality than the BluRay's they were ripped from. The real problem I am encountering is playing back BluRay video from discs. For some reason, I am encountering rather terrible stuttering problems with both the audio and video. The stuttering is synchronous in both, and occurs at seemingly random intervals. I've used PowerDVD 9, PowerDVD 11 trial, and WinDVD 11 Pro trial. All three have stuttering problems, although PowerDVD 11 seems to have the least. Watching system resource usage, CPU load is never above 20%, and memory usage tends to be a constant 1/3rd the total available system memory. When playback is fine, its superb...the video is crystal clear. The audio quality is ok, certainly not what I would expect from a BluRay disc. I did some research, and it seems that playing BluRay from a PC causes a downsampling of the audio? I am curious if the audio is my primary problem here, the cause of the stuttering I am encountering? When stuttering occurs, the audio gets REALLY bad, while the video just pauses momentarily every second until for whatever reason everything picks up and runs fine (usually after a few seconds to a couple minutes.) The audio chipset is a Realtek HD ALC887 8-channel, supposedly designed to support BluRay playback. Has anyone encountered any issues like this playing back bluray discs on a PC (namely with PowerDVD...WinDVD was FAR worse, and seemed to have real trouble even reading the discs, and I have no interest in fiddling with it further.) Is there any reason to suspect the video decoding as the problem?(Given how bad the audio gets during a stutter, and how clean the video remains, I am inclined to think the issue boils down to audio.) Is it even remotely possible that the motherboard, cpu, or ram are causing the stuttering (all three are pretty blazing fast...faster than the hardware that I replaced, which seemed to play BluRay fine with PowerDVD 9.) I've read a bit about the Asus Xonar HDAV 1.3 and the Auzen X-Fi HomeTheater HD home theater hi-fi audio cards. Seems they are the only way to get true full-quality, uncompressed BluRay audio bitstreaming over HDMI on a PC. None of the usual suspects seem to have these cards in stock, however. Are these cards worth getting? Are they even still available, or have they been discontinued (if so, that would indeed be sad...they sound simply fantastic.)

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• KVM + Cloudmin + IpTables

  - by Alex

  I have a KVM virtualization on a machine. I use Ubuntu Server + Cloudmin (in order to manage virtual machine instances). On a host system I have four network interfaces: ebadmin@saturn:/var/log$ ifconfig br0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 10:78:d2:ec:16:38 inet addr:192.168.0.253 Bcast:192.168.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: fe80::1278:d2ff:feec:1638/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:589337 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:334357 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:753652448 (753.6 MB) TX bytes:43385198 (43.3 MB) br1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 6e:a4:06:39:26:60 inet addr:192.168.10.1 Bcast:192.168.10.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: fe80::6ca4:6ff:fe39:2660/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:16995 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:13309 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:2059264 (2.0 MB) TX bytes:1763980 (1.7 MB) eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 10:78:d2:ec:16:38 UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:610558 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:332382 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:769477564 (769.4 MB) TX bytes:44360402 (44.3 MB) Interrupt:20 Memory:fe400000-fe420000 lo Link encap:Local Loopback inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1 RX packets:239632 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:239632 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:50738052 (50.7 MB) TX bytes:50738052 (50.7 MB) tap0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 6e:a4:06:39:26:60 inet6 addr: fe80::6ca4:6ff:fe39:2660/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:17821 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:13703 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:500 RX bytes:2370468 (2.3 MB) TX bytes:1782356 (1.7 MB) br0 is connected to a real network, br1 is used to create a private network shared between guest systems. Now I need to configure iptables for network access. First of all I allow ssh sessions on port 8022 on the host system, then I allow all connections in state RELATED, ESTABLISHED. This is working ok. I install another system as guest, it's IP address is 192.168.10.2, and now I have two problems: I want to allow the access from this host to the outside world, cannot accomplish this. I can ssh from the host. I want to be able to ssh to the guest from the outside world using 8023 port. Cannot accomplish this. Full iptables configuration is following: ebadmin@saturn:/var/log$ sudo iptables --list [sudo] password for ebadmin: Chain INPUT (policy DROP) target prot opt source destination ACCEPT all -- anywhere anywhere ACCEPT tcp -- anywhere anywhere tcp dpt:8022 ACCEPT all -- anywhere anywhere state RELATED,ESTABLISHED LOG all -- anywhere anywhere LOG level warning Chain FORWARD (policy ACCEPT) target prot opt source destination LOG all -- anywhere anywhere LOG level warning Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT) target prot opt source destination LOG all -- anywhere anywhere LOG level warning ebadmin@saturn:/var/log$ sudo iptables -t nat --list Chain PREROUTING (policy ACCEPT) target prot opt source destination DNAT tcp -- anywhere anywhere tcp spt:8023 to:192.168.10.2:22 Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT) target prot opt source destination Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT) target prot opt source destination Chain POSTROUTING (policy ACCEPT) target prot opt source destination The worst of all is that I don't know how to interpret iptables logs. I don't see the final decision of the firewall. Need help urgently.

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• Wear and tear on server hard drive from filesystem polling by PHP script

  - by jackie

  So I'm working on a discussion platform, and various clients will visit http://host/thread.php, which will render the discussion thread to date in addition to a form to submit a new post. When a new post is submitted, I would like all of the other clients with browser windows open to have it appear in near-real-time. One of the constraints of my script is that it may not use a DBMS and it must stay in the filesystem. Additionally, I can't use any PECL/PEAR extensions like inotify or anything like that for IPC. The flow will look like this: Client A requests thread.php and the thread is so far empty, but nonetheless it opens a Server-Side Event at eventPusher.php. Client B does the same. Client A fills out a post in the form and and submits (POSTs) it to subHandler.php. ??? (subHandler stores the new submission into the main thread storefile which gets read from when a fresh, new client requests thread.php, in addition to somehow signalling to the continually-running eventPusher event-source that a new comment was posted and that it should echo the event-json to the client. How, exactly, it will send this signal I'm yet unsure of, but there are a few options that I've thought of -- this is the crux of the question, so see below for more clarification) eventPusher.php happily pushes the new event to the client and it shows up soon after it was originally submitted on all clients who have the page open's screens. Now for the #4 missing-link mystery-step, I see a few problems. I mean, either way, eventPusher is gonna be doing a while loop of some sort -- it's gonna be polling something, I think that much is clear. (If that's a bad assumption please do let me know.) Now, the simplest way would be subHandler gets invoked on the form submission, writes it to the main store in addition to newComments.xml, then exits without doing anything else. Then eventPusher checks in newComments.xml every X seconds (by the way, what would be a reasonable time interval here?) and if it finds something then it emits an event to the client. Now, my fear with this is that the server's hard drive will have to constantly start spinning up. Maybe this isn't the case, perhaps it would just get cached in RAM and the linux kernel would take care of this transparently such that filesystem access doesn't actually engage the device because the kernel knows that that particular file hasn't changed since last read. * idea #2: I have no idea how to go about this, but perhaps there is a variable scope that gets stored in general RAM on the system which can be read by any process. Like if we mega-exported a bash variable so that $new_post is normally false but it gets toggled to true by subHandler, and then back to flase once it's pushed to the client. I doubt there's such a variable scope in PHP directly, but I struggle with the concept of variable scope, I just can't seem to understand it no matter what I read on it. * idea #3: eventPusher queries ps in its whileloop for another instance of itself. If there's not another eventPusher active then it's highly unlikely that new comments will be getting submitted. It's okay if this only works =90% of the time, it doesn't need to be completely foolproof. * idea #4: eventPusher queries DMESG to see if that file's been written to recently. So to sum everything up, I need to have inter-php-script-communication in near-real-time that will work on a standard mod_php shared hosting setup without any elevated privileges, PHP addon modules, or other system adjustments that can't be done from the PHP script itself at runtime. With*out* spinning up the drive more than a few times. No SQL servers either. Apologies if my english isn't the best, I'm still trying to improve on it.

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• How to troubleshoot problem with OpenVPN Appliance Server not able to connect

  - by Peter

  1) I have a Windows Server 2008 Standard SP2 2) I am running Hyper-V and have the OpenVPN Appliance Server virtual running 3) I have configured it as it said, only issue was that the legacy network adapter does not have a setting the instructions mention "Enable spoofing of MAC Addresses". My understand is that before R2, this was on by default. 4) Server is running, web interfaces look good 5) I am trying to connect from a Vista 64 box and cannot 5a) If I set to UPD I am stuck at Authorizing and client log looks like: 10/11/09 15:00:42: INFO: OvpnConfig: connect... 10/11/09 15:00:42: INFO: Gui listen socket at 34567 10/11/09 15:00:42: INFO: sending start command to instantiator... 10/11/09 15:00:42: INFO: start 34567 ?C:\Users\Peter\AppData\Roaming\OpenVPNTech\config?02369512D0C82A04B88093022DA0226202218022A902264022AE022B? 10/11/09 15:00:42: INFO: Got line from MI->>INFO:OpenVPN Management Interface Version 1 -- type 'help' for more info 10/11/09 15:00:42: INFO: Got line from MI->>HOLD:Waiting for hold release 10/11/09 15:00:43: INFO: Got line from MI->SUCCESS: real-time state notification set to ON 10/11/09 15:00:43: INFO: Got line from MI->SUCCESS: bytecount interval changed 10/11/09 15:00:43: INFO: Got line from MI->SUCCESS: hold flag set to OFF 10/11/09 15:00:43: INFO: Got line from MI->SUCCESS: hold release succeeded 10/11/09 15:00:43: INFO: Got line from MI->>PASSWORD:Need 'Auth' username/password 10/11/09 15:00:43: INFO: Processing PASSWORD. 10/11/09 15:00:43: INFO: OvpnClient: setting need auth to true. 10/11/09 15:00:43: INFO: OvpnConfig: Setting need auth to true. 10/11/09 15:00:43: INFO: Got auth request from active_config from 0 10/11/09 15:00:47: INFO: Sending Credentials.... 10/11/09 15:00:47: INFO: Sending 25 bytes for username. 10/11/09 15:00:47: INFO: Sent 25 bytes for username. 10/11/09 15:00:47: INFO: Sending 30 bytes for password. 10/11/09 15:00:47: INFO: Sent 30 bytes for password. 10/11/09 15:00:48: INFO: Got line from MI->SUCCESS: 'Auth' username entered, but not yet verified 10/11/09 15:00:48: INFO: Got line from MI->SUCCESS: 'Auth' password entered, but not yet verified 10/11/09 15:00:48: INFO: Got line from MI->>STATE:1255287647,WAIT,,, 10/11/09 15:00:48: INFO: Got line from MI->>BYTECOUNT:0,42 10/11/09 15:00:48: INFO: Got line from MI->>BYTECOUNT:54,42 10/11/09 15:00:48: INFO: Got line from MI->>STATE:1255287648,AUTH,,, 10/11/09 15:00:50: INFO: Got line from MI->>BYTECOUNT:2560,2868 10/11/09 15:00:52: INFO: Got line from MI->>BYTECOUNT:2560,3378 5b) I setup server for tcp and try to connect, I get a loop of authorizing and reconnecting. Log looks like: 10/11/09 15:00:42: INFO: Got line from MI->>HOLD:Waiting for hold release 10/11/09 15:00:43: INFO: Got line from MI->SUCCESS: real-time state notification set to ON 10/11/09 15:00:43: INFO: Got line from MI->SUCCESS: bytecount interval changed 10/11/09 15:00:43: INFO: Got line from MI->SUCCESS: hold flag set to OFF 10/11/09 15:00:43: INFO: Got line from MI->SUCCESS: hold release succeeded 10/11/09 15:00:43: INFO: Got line from MI->>PASSWORD:Need 'Auth' username/password 10/11/09 15:00:43: INFO: Processing PASSWORD. 10/11/09 15:00:43: INFO: OvpnClient: setting need auth to true. 10/11/09 15:00:43: INFO: OvpnConfig: Setting need auth to true. 10/11/09 15:00:43: INFO: Got auth request from active_config from 0 10/11/09 15:00:47: INFO: Sending Credentials.... 10/11/09 15:00:47: INFO: Sending 25 bytes for username. 10/11/09 15:00:47: INFO: Sent 25 bytes for username. 10/11/09 15:00:47: INFO: Sending 30 bytes for password. 10/11/09 15:00:47: INFO: Sent 30 bytes for password. 10/11/09 15:00:48: INFO: Got line from MI->SUCCESS: 'Auth' username entered, but not yet verified 10/11/09 15:00:48: INFO: Got line from MI->SUCCESS: 'Auth' password entered, but not yet verified 10/11/09 15:00:48: INFO: Got line from MI->>STATE:1255287647,WAIT,,, 10/11/09 15:00:48: INFO: Got line from MI->>BYTECOUNT:0,42 10/11/09 15:00:48: INFO: Got line from MI->>BYTECOUNT:54,42 10/11/09 15:00:48: INFO: Got line from MI->>STATE:1255287648,AUTH,,, 10/11/09 15:00:50: INFO: Got line from MI->>BYTECOUNT:2560,2868 10/11/09 15:00:52: INFO: Got line from MI->>BYTECOUNT:2560,3378 10/11/09 15:00:54: INFO: Got line from MI->>BYTECOUNT:2560,3888 ... Is there anyway to turn on robust logging on the server to understand what is happening? Any ideas on how to hunt this down?

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• What NAS setup for two-way syncing over the internet?

  - by Jamse

  I have family living a few hours away and have a lot of files that I would like to share - especially lots of folders of digital photos, but also documents etc. - partially so they can see them, partially so I can have access when I visit them and partially for backup / redundancy purposes. My current hard drives on my main machine are getting pretty full anyway, and I have a MythTV box where my music is currently stored, so I was thinking of getting a NAS anyway. And at the other end my family have a few computers, so they would probably benefit from a NAS too. My general idea (though I'm willing to shift on this if there are any bright ideas about other ways of achieving my objectives) is to get a matching pair of NASs and have them sync over the internet. (To cut down on bandwidth use I would get them in sync locally to start with.) Having read around as best I can it seems that syncing over the internet is generally only a feature on quite high end units. However, I have seen that QNAP seem to feature this on their TS-110 and TS-210 units, which might work (they call it "remote replication"). They seem pretty reasonably priced for what they are, but of course with buying 2 of them and then adding the drives (say 1TB or 2TB each) I'd be looking at about £400 total. So, I'm looking for recommendations really. I don't want to spend more than the QNAPs would cost me, but any other ideas would be most appreciated. I am comfortable with technology and tinkering around, but I don't have as much time for that as I would like, so I guess I would favour solutions that require less tinkering rather than more (even though that's less fun!). Any thoughts would be welcome, as would any comments from people who have used the QNAP boxes for this. Thanks in advance. Some specifications: Two-way syncing. Changes made at either end should be synced to the other. There shouldn't be one unit that is effectively a read-only mirror of the other. Not real time. The syncing doesn't need to be real time - if it updated, say, daily overnight that would be fine. Set and forget. I would prefer minimal user interaction once set up - it would be great if syncs were scheduled and automatic. OS independence. I am running Windows XP plus an Ubuntu-based MythTV box. At the other end there are Windows 7 and Windows XP machines, plus a networked TV set top box which I think can play files off the network. Machine independence. I would favour a system that is self-contained, i.e. not reliant on any particular PC being switched on. If the system had enough else going for it I could perhaps work around it at this end, where I only have one PC that's used as such, but it would be harder at the other where there are at least two PCs that might be accessing the files. Notifications. I guess things like getting an email notification if the syncing fell over for any reason would be useful, though it's not a deal breaker. Update I've been digging some more and it looks like QNAP's Remote Replication function is actually just Rsync, so only really suitable for one-way syncing. I've posted on their forum to double check, but I think that's the case. In which case, I think the focus of my question is now either: do any reasonably-priced NASs support bidirectional syncing over the internet?, or has anyone had any luck installing onto NASs for this purpose? (Also, updated question to clarify that I'm after two-way syncing.)

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• Using different SSDs types (not only SATA based) as system drive

  - by Hubert Kario

  Currently I have a Thinkpad X61s and want to make it both a bit faster and a bit more power efficient. For that reason I thought that adding SSD drive would make most sense. Unfortunately, because of financial reasons, buying SSD of over 200GB capacity is out of reach for me (not only it would be worth more than the rest of the laptop, but also I currently have a 500GB drive in it, so even such a drive would be kind of a downgrade for me). During preliminary testing with a cheap Transcend 4GB Class 6 (14MiB/s streaming, 9MiB/s random read) card I experienced boot times to be reduced by half so putting the OS only on it would already would be an improvement. Unfortunately, my system now is about 11GiB in size so anything less than 16GB would be constraining. In this laptop I can connect additional drives on at least 5 different ways: using SATA-ATA converter caddy in the X6 Ultrabase using internal mini PCIe slot using integrated SDHC slot using CardBus (a.k.a PCMCIA or PC Card) slot using USB Thankfully, because I use only Linux on this PC the bootability of them is irrelevant as I can put the /boot partition on internal HDD and / on any of the above mentioned Flash memories (as I already did for the SDHC test). From what I was able to research and from my own experience those options come with rather big downsides or other problems: SATA-ATA caddy It has three downsides: I have to carry the Ultrabse with me at all times (it's not really inconvenient, but those grams do add) and couldn't disconnect it when I want to disconnect the battery It makes the bay unusable for the optical drive and occasional quick access to other hard drives the only caddies I could buy have rather flaky controllers in them so putting my OS on it would hamper its stability Internal mini PCIe slot This would be an ideal solution, if only I could find real PCIe SSDs, not only devices that could talk only SATA or ATA over PCIe mechanical connection (the ones used in Dell Mini or Asus EEE). Theoretically Samsung did release such devices but I couldn't find them in retail anywhere. Integrated SDHC slot It's a nice solution with a single drawback: the fastest 16GB SDHC card on the market can only do around 35MiB/s read and 15MiB/s write while still costing like a normal 40GB SATA SSD that's 10 times faster. Not really cost-effective. CardBus (a.k.a PCMCIA or PC Card) slot Those cards are much faster than the SDHC option (there are ones that can do well over 50MiB/s read in benchmarks) and from what I could find the PCMCIA controller in my laptop does support UDMA so it should be able to deliver comparable speeds. They still cost similarly to SD cards but at least they provide streaming performance comparable to my current HDD. USB That's the worst option. Not only is it limited to 20-30MiB/s by the interface itself the drive would stick out of the laptop so it's a big no no. The question As such I think that going the "CF in a CardBus adapter" route will be the best option. My question is: did anyone try using CF cards in CardBus adapters as system drives with Linux on Thinkpad laptops? Laptops in general? What was the real-world performance? I don't have any CF cards so I can't check how well does it work with suspend/resume, or whatever it's easy to make it work in initramfs (I'm using ArchLinux and SD card was trivial — add 3 modules in single config line and rebuilding initramfs) so any tips/gotchas on this are welcome as well.

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• shinken/nagios discriminative between warning alert and critical alert

  - by SWdream

  i using shinken for my monitoring system. Now, i have a problem when i configure shinken notification. My purpose is to discriminative between notification for warning state and critical state of check service: with warning state: + time to send alert from 8h = 18 h everyday, via email and sms + notification_interval is 60 minutes (Re-notify about service problems every hour) with critical state: + time to send alert : all time (24 x 7), via email and sms + notification_interval is 30 minutes Please show me how to solve my problem! I have tried the following: i configured: + contact templates: define contact{ name warning-contact ; The name of this contact template register 0 ; DONT REGISTER THIS DEFINITION - ITS NOT A REAL CONTACT, JUST A TEMPLATE! host_notifications_enabled 1 define contact{ service_notifications_enabled 1 email shinken@localhost can_submit_commands 1 notificationways email_warning, sms_warning } define contact{ name critical-contact ; The name of this contact template register 0 ; DONT REGISTER THIS DEFINITION - ITS NOT A REAL CONTACT, JUST A TEMPLATE! host_notifications_enabled 1 service_notifications_enabled 1 email shinken@localhost can_submit_commands 1 notificationways email_critical, sms_critical } + time poriod templates: define timeperiod{ timeperiod_name warning alias Normal Work Hours monday 08:00-18:00 tuesday 08:00-18:00 wednesday 08:00-18:00 thursday 08:00-18:00 friday 08:00-18:00 saturday 08:00-18:00 sunday 08:00-18:00 #exclude 24x7 } define timeperiod{ timeperiod_name 24x7 alias 24_Hours_A_Day,_7_Days_A_Week sunday 00:00-24:00 monday 00:00-24:00 tuesday 00:00-24:00 wednesday 00:00-24:00 thursday 00:00-24:00 friday 00:00-24:00 saturday 00:00-24:00 #exclude workhours } + notification way templates: define notificationway{ notificationway_name email_warning service_notification_period warning host_notification_period warning service_notification_options w host_notification_options d,u,r,f,s notification_interval 60 ; Resend notifications every 30 minutes service_notification_commands notify-service-by-email ; send service notifications via email host_notification_commands notify-host-by-email ; send host notifications via email } define notificationway{ notificationway_name email_critical service_notification_period 24x7 host_notification_period 24x7 service_notification_options c,r host_notification_options d,u,r,f,s notification_interval 30 ; Resend notifications every 30 minutes service_notification_commands notify-service-by-email ; send service notifications via email host_notification_commands notify-host-by-email ; send host notifications via email } define notificationway{ notificationway_name sms_warning service_notification_period warning host_notification_period warning service_notification_options w host_notification_options d,u,r,f,s notification_interval 60 ; Resend notifications every 30 minutes service_notification_commands notify-service-by-sms ; send service notifications via sms host_notification_commands notify-host-by-sms ; send host notifications via sms } define notificationway{ notificationway_name sms_critical service_notification_period 24x7 host_notification_period 24x7 service_notification_options c,r host_notification_options d,u,r,f,s notification_interval 30 ; Resend notifications every 30 minutes service_notification_commands notify-service-by-sms ; send service notifications via sms host_notification_commands notify-host-by-sms ; send host notifications via sms } + my contacts define contact{ use warning-contact contact_name thanhwarn email xxxx pager xxxx ; contact phone number } define contact{ use critical-contact contact_name thanhcritical email xxxxx pager 01689xxxx ; contact phone number } + and define service: define service{ use generic-service service_description check_ram host_name graphite contacts thanhcritical, thanhwarn check_command check_nrpe!check_ram } but my shinken system don't send alert. i don't understand this. please show me where I went wrong! thanks all!

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• Trouble in Nginx hotlink protection

  - by Ayaz Malik

  I am trying to implement image hotlink protection problem in nginx and I need help. I have a huge issue of my site's images being submitted to social networks like StumbleUpon with a direct link like http://example.com/xxxxx.jpg Which sometimes gets huge traffic and increases CPU usage and bandwidth usage. I want to block direct access to my images from other referrers and protect them from being hotlinked. Here is the code from my vhost.conf server { access_log off; error_log logs/vhost-error_log warn; listen 80; server_name mydomain.com www.mydomain.com; # uncomment location below to make nginx serve static files instead of Apache # NOTE this will cause issues with bandwidth accounting as files wont be logged location ~* \.(gif|jpg|jpeg|png|wmv|avi|mpg|mpeg|mp4|htm|html|js|css)$ { root /home/username/public_html; expires 1d; } root /home/mydomain/public_html; } location / { client_max_body_size 10m; client_body_buffer_size 128k; proxy_send_timeout 90; proxy_read_timeout 90; proxy_buffer_size 4k; # you can increase proxy_buffers here to suppress "an upstream response # is buffered to a temporary file" warning proxy_buffers 16 32k; proxy_busy_buffers_size 64k; proxy_temp_file_write_size 64k; proxy_connect_timeout 30s; proxy_redirect http://www.mydomain.com:81 http://www.mydomain.com; proxy_redirect http://mydomain.com:81 http://mydomain.com; proxy_pass http://ip_address/; proxy_set_header Host $host; proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; expires 24h; } } For hotlink protection I added this code location ~* (\.jpg|\.png|\.gif|\.jpeg)$ { valid_referers blocked www.mydomain.com mydomain.com; if ($invalid_referer) { return 403; } This is the current nginx code for this domain, but it didn't work: server { access_log off; error_log logs/vhost-error_log warn; listen 80; server_name mydomain.com www.mydomain.com; # uncomment location below to make nginx serve static files instead of Apache # NOTE this will cause issues with bandwidth accounting as files wont be logged location ~* \.(gif|jpg|jpeg|png|wmv|avi|mpg|mpeg|mp4|htm|html|js|css)$ { root /home/username/public_html; expires 1d; } root /home/mydomain/public_html; } location ~* (\.jpg|\.png|\.gif|\.jpeg)$ { valid_referers blocked www.mydomain.com mydomain.com; if ($invalid_referer) { return 403; } location / { client_max_body_size 10m; client_body_buffer_size 128k; proxy_send_timeout 90; proxy_read_timeout 90; proxy_buffer_size 4k; # you can increase proxy_buffers here to suppress "an upstream response # is buffered to a temporary file" warning proxy_buffers 16 32k; proxy_busy_buffers_size 64k; proxy_temp_file_write_size 64k; proxy_connect_timeout 30s; proxy_redirect http://www.mydomain.com:81 http://www.mydomain.com; proxy_redirect http://mydomain.com:81 http://mydomain.com; proxy_pass http://ip_address/; proxy_set_header Host $host; proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; expires 24h; } } How can I fix this?

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• Setting environment variables in OS X

  - by Percival Ulysses

  Despite the warning that questions that can be answered are preferred, this question is more a request for comments. I apologize for this, but I feel that it is valuable nonetheless. The problem to set up environment variables such that they are available for GUI applications has been around since the dawn of Mac OS X. The solution with ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist never satisfied me because it was not reliable, and bash style globbing wasn't available. Another solution is the use of Login Hooks with a suitable shell script, but these are deprecated. The Apple approved way for such functionality as provided by login hooks is the use of Launch Agents. I provided a launch agent that is located in /Library/LaunchAgents/: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd"> <plist version="1.0"> <dict> <key>Label</key> <string>user.conf.launchd</string> <key>Program</key> <string>/Users/Shared/conflaunchd.sh</string> <key>ProgramArguments</key> <array> <string>~/.conf.launchd</string> </array> <key>EnableGlobbing</key> <true/> <key>RunAtLoad</key> <true/> <key>LimitLoadToSessionType</key> <array> <string>Aqua</string> <string>StandardIO</string> </array> </dict> </plist> The real work is done in the shell script /Users/Shared/conflaunchd.sh, which reads ~/.conf.launchd and feeds it to launchctl: #! /bin/bash #filename="$1" filename="$HOME/.conf.launchd" if [ ! -r "$filename" ]; then exit fi eval $(/usr/libexec/path_helper -s) while read line; do # skip lines that only contain whitespace or a comment if [ ! -n "$line" -o `expr "$line" : '#'` -gt 0 ]; then continue; fi eval launchctl $line done <"$filename" exit 0 Notice the call of path_helper to get PATH set up right. Finally, ~/.conf.launchd looks like that setenv PATH ~/Applications:"${PATH}" setenv TEXINPUTS .:~/Documents/texmf//: setenv BIBINPUTS .:~/Documents/texmf/bibtex//: setenv BSTINPUTS .:~/Documents/texmf/bibtex//: # Locale setenv LANG en_US.UTF-8 These are launchctl commands, see its manpage for further information. Works fine for me (I should mention that I'm still a Snow Leopard guy), GUI applications such as texstudio can see my local texmf tree. Things that can be improved: The shell script has a #filename="$1" in it. This is not accidental, as the file name should be feeded to the script by the launch agent as an argument, but that doesn't work. It is possible to put the script in the launch agent itsself. I am not sure how secure this solution is, as it uses eval with user provided strings. It should be mentioned that Apple intended a somewhat similar approach by putting stuff in ~/launchd.conf, but it is currently unsupported as to this date and OS (see the manpage of launchd.conf). I guess that things like globbing would not work as they do in this proposal. Finally, I would mention the sources I used as information on Launch Agents, but StackExchange doesn't let me [1], [2], [3]. Again, I am sorry that this is not a real question, I still hope it is useful.

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• What NAS setup for syncing over the internet?

  - by Jamse

  I have family living a few hours away and have a lot of files that I would like to share - especially lots of folders of digital photos, but also documents etc. - partially so they can see them, partially so I can have access when I visit them and partially for backup / redundancy purposes. My current hard drives on my main machine are getting pretty full anyway, and I have a MythTV box where my music is currently stored, so I was thinking of getting a NAS anyway. And at the other end my family have a few computers, so they would probably benefit from a NAS too. My general idea (though I'm willing to shift on this if there are any bright ideas about other ways of achieving my objectives) is to get a matching pair of NASs and have them sync over the internet. (To cut down on bandwidth use I would get them in sync locally to start with.) Having read around as best I can it seems that syncing over the internet is generally only a feature on quite high end units. However, I have seen that QNAP seem to feature this on their TS-110 and TS-210 units, which might work (they call it "remote replication"). They seem pretty reasonably priced for what they are, but of course with buying 2 of them and then adding the drives (say 1TB or 2TB each) I'd be looking at about £400 total. So, I'm looking for recommendations really. I don't want to spend more than the QNAPs would cost me, but any other ideas would be most appreciated. I am comfortable with technology and tinkering around, but I don't have as much time for that as I would like, so I guess I would favour solutions that require less tinkering rather than more (even though that's less fun!). Any thoughts would be welcome, as would any comments from people who have used the QNAP boxes for this. Thanks in advance. Some specifications: Two-way syncing. Changes made at either end should be synced to the other. There shouldn't be one unit that is effectively a read-only mirror of the other. Not real time. The syncing doesn't need to be real time - if it updated, say, daily overnight that would be fine. Set and forget. I would prefer minimal user interaction once set up - it would be great if syncs were scheduled and automatic. OS independence. I am running Windows XP plus an Ubuntu-based MythTV box. At the other end there are Windows 7 and Windows XP machines, plus a networked TV set top box which I think can play files off the network. Machine independence. I would favour a system that is self-contained, i.e. not reliant on any particular PC being switched on. If the system had enough else going for it I could perhaps work around it at this end, where I only have one PC that's used as such, but it would be harder at the other where there are at least two PCs that might be accessing the files. Notifications. I guess things like getting an email notification if the syncing fell over for any reason would be useful, though it's not a deal breaker.

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• Installing EclipseFP on Mac OS X

  - by Dom Kennedy

  I am trying to install EclipseFP. I'm running OS X Mavericks. I've tried following both the official installation instructions and the advice in this answer on SU, but I'm still having the same problem. I can get the plugin itself installed painlessly using Help -> Install New Software..., Bbut when I restart and switch to the Haskell perspective, things start to go wrong. The installation instructions tells me that I should receive a prompt to install BuildWrapper and Scion Browser. I do not receive this prompt. Furthermore, if I create a new Haskell project, my code has no syntax highlighting, and the Hoogle search feature does not appear to do anything. It's clear that the plugin is not set up correctly yet. I've tried running cabal update in Terminal, but this does not change anything. After several attempts going round in circles with this on Eclipse Juno, I uninstalled Eclispe and the Haskell Platform and performed a clean install of Eclipse Luna and the latest Haskell Platform. However, the problems are persisting. I've tried going into Preferences to see if I could sort any of this out manually. I should initially point out that my GHC installation seems to be correctly references under Preferences -> Haskell Implementations Under Haskell -> Helper executables, there are areas for configuring the options of both BuildWrapper and Scion Browser. At present, both are blank. I tried clicking the Install from Hackage... button beside each of them with no success; I receive an error message saying Expected executable <workspace>/.metadata/.plugins/net.sf.eclipsefp.haskell.ui/sandbox/.cabal-sandbox/bin/buildwrapper not found!` (replace buildwrapper for scion-browser and the message is the same) The Eclipse console displays the following exception after doing the above with BuildWrapper: src/Language/Haskell/BuildWrapper/GHCStorage.hs:313:32: Not in scope: data constructor ‘MatchGroup’ cabal.real: Error: some packages failed to install: buildwrapper-0.7.4 failed during the building phase. The exception was: ExitFailure 1 and after doing it for Scion-Browser: zip-archive-0.2.3.4 (reinstall) changes: text-1.1.0.0 -> 0.11.3.1 pandoc-1.12.3.3 (latest: 1.13) -http-conduit (new version) Graphalyze-0.14.1.0 (reinstall) changes: pandoc-1.12.4.2 -> 1.12.3.3, text-1.1.0.0 -> 0.11.3.1 cabal.real: The following packages are likely to be broken by the reinstalls: pandoc-1.12.4.2 unordered-containers-0.2.4.0 aeson-0.7.0.4 scientific-0.2.0.2 case-insensitive-1.1.0.3 HTTP-4000.2.10 Use --force-reinstalls if you want to install anyway. After receiving similar results as the above on previous attempts, I've tried using force-reinstalls and ended up at more dead ends. I am at a loss as to what is wrong and how to solve this. I should point out that my GHC installation appears to be correctly configured under Preferences -> Haskell -> Haskell Implementations. Apologies if any of this information is irrelevant, I'm just not really sure what is important and what isn't at this point. Any help anyone could provide me with would be greatly appreciated.

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• How to install Delorme StreetAtlas (any version) + GPS inside VirtualBox VM?

  - by hotei

  When I try to run the install program I get a popup message that says the installer program is not a valid executable. Background: I want a GPS with maps on my laptop running Ubuntu 10.4LTS. Unfortunately I can't find a decent native Linux GPS solution with 50 state US street level coverage. I have VirtualBox VMs available for WinXP and Win7 (among others). The VMs work fine with MicroSoft Streets and Trips (2010) and MapNGo 5 (a very! old Delorme product), but while both these products support GPS, they don't support the Earthmate LT-40 USB GPS I already have. I've got pretty much every Delorme Street Atlas they've released in the last decade and none of them will install in a VM. Any help would be much appreciated. Clarification: I've installed the Delorme products from these CDs before and the disks are fine - as long as installation is done on a "physical" machine. Added: I've tried install from an iso as well as the real CD. No difference in result (setup.exe is not a valid executable) The WinXP is SP-2 (held back on purpose at this point - I'll snapshot and fork a later SP to test). The Win2K is SP-6a. Win7(32) VM is whatever updates came out last week. The USB setup is working at least to the point where the GPS device is active in the device list (has an x in the box). At this point its not relevant because the program that needs to read it can't even be installed. Added 9-19: Added wine as harrymc suggested. Initial result was no change. Here's wines error message. The file '/media/Disk1/setup.exe' is not marked as executable. If this was downloaded or copied form an untrusted source, it may be dangerous to run. For more details, read about the executable bit. At first I thought the execute bit was the problem, but looking at several other windows CDs I see that the execute bit is not set on their exe files (which install to VM without error). Still it was worth a shot so I copied the StreetAtlas 9 DVD to my hard disk, changed the on-disk exe files to have the execute bit set and tried to install again. This time the install via wine got me through the installation process. When I start the program it bombs immediately, so we haven't made much real progress so far. I very much prefer the VM solution to wine, so I'm going back to that for now. To recap the VM situation, using an updated XP with SP3 and all recommended hotfixes: StreetAtlas 2009 USA fails with "not marked as executable". StreetAtlas 2007 USA fails with "not marked as executable". StreetAtlas 9 (copyright 2001) fails with "not marked as executable". SteeetAtlas (copyright 1991) fails with "not marked as executable" Delorme Topo 4 (copyright 2002) fails with "not marked as executable". Just about ready to give up. So I switched from XP VM to Win7 VM and tried StreetAtlas 2009 again. This time it installs. Earthmate USB GPS works. WTH? I feel like the monkey who just wrote a line of Shakespear. I'm smiling because it worked, but I have no clue why. I'm awarding the bounty to harrymc because wine did give some useful insight into the problem and a +1 to goyiux as thanks for helping.

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• Exchange Server 2007 Send and Receive Connectors

  - by Mistiry

  I have gotten awesome advice from users on here for getting Exchange on Windows SBS 2008 set up. I think this is the final piece and I'm ready for roll-out! I need to set up Exchange so that it RECEIVES mail from our existing mail server as a Forward [aliases on the existing mail server to forward mail from [email protected] to [email protected]] (not using the POP3 Connector), and SENDS mail through that server as well (sends from [email protected] to [email protected] and then out to the world, showing in the headers as from [email protected] or at absolute least have the reply-to set as this). Alternatively, as long as the .net email address doesn't show in the From and replies are directed to the .com account, email can go from Exchange to the outside world without directing through the existing mail server. External Domain: domain.com Internal Domain: domain.local Internet Domain Name Set in SBS Console: domain.net When I go to http://remote.domain.net I get the Remote Web Workspace, and can login to both Sharepoint and OWA. I can send an email from OWA to a GMail account. I receive it from [email protected], which is an alias of [email protected]. I cannot, however, send an email from OWA to ANY domain.com email addresses. I am also not receiving any email to this Exchange account (except for NDRs). When I try sending an email to a domain.com account, here is the error (I had to replace all < and with { and }): Delivery has failed to these recipients or distribution lists: [email protected] The recipient's e-mail address was not found in the recipient's e-mail system. Microsoft Exchange will not try to redeliver this message for you. Please check the e-mail address and try resending this message, or provide the following diagnostic text to your system administrator. Generating server: IFEXCHANGE.domain.local [email protected] #550 5.1.1 RESOLVER.ADR.RecipNotFound; not found ## Original message headers: Received: from IFEXCHANGE.domain.local ([fe80::4d34:abc5:f7fd:e51a]) by IFEXCHANGE.domain.local ([fe80::4d34:abc5:f7fd:e51a%10]) with mapi; Tue, 17 Aug 2010 14:14:14 -0400 Content-Type: application/ms-tnef; name="winmail.dat" Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary From: John Doe {[email protected]} To: "[email protected]" {[email protected]} Date: Tue, 17 Aug 2010 14:14:12 -0400 Subject: asdf Thread-Topic: asdf Thread-Index: AQHLPjf+h6hA5MJ1JUu1WS4I4CiWeA== Message-ID: {E4E10393768D784D8760A51938BA456A029934BA30@IFEXCHANGE.domain.local} Accept-Language: en-US Content-Language: en-US X-MS-Has-Attach: X-MS-TNEF-Correlator: {E4E10393768D784D8760A51938BA456A029934BA30@IFEXCHANGE.domain.local} MIME-Version: 1.0 I hope I explained the situation well enough for someone to be able to explain to me what I'm missing. If I could, I'd be putting a 10K bounty, but unfortunately I've got only 74 reputation (hey, I'm a newbie here!). I'm pretty sure the obvious "RecipNotFound" error is why its not working, my question is how to resolve this. The email account exists, it receives mail just fine, yet when I send it from the Exchange server it fails. EDIT In OC-Hub Transport, the Email Address Policies has 2 entries. "Windows SBS Email Address Policy" is set up to: Include All Recipient Types, no conditions, and SMTP %[email protected]. "Default Policy" set to: Include All Recipient Types, no conditions, and SMTP @domain.net. Three Authoritative Accepted domains domain.com domain.local (Default) domain.net Remote Domains tab has two entries. Default with domain * Windows SBS Company Web Domain with domain companyweb.

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• How To Start Your Own Professional Blog with WordPress

  - by Matthew Guay

  Would you like to start your own blog or website?  With a free WordPress  account, it’s free and easy to get started creating your own professional quality blog site. This is the first part in a series on how to create your own professional quality blog site. No, we’re not talking about some cheapo looking blog from Blogger or something on Facebook, but creating a quality blog you can be proud of and present to millions of readers online. WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platforms, powering hundreds of high-profile websites and blogs around the world.  It’s both powerful and easy to use, which makes it great whether you’re just starting out or are a blogging pro.  To start out with your blogging project WordPress is completely free, and you can use the online interface or install the WordPress software on your own server and blog from there. Getting Started You can start a blog in just a few minutes.  Head over to WordPress.com and click Sign up now on the right-hand side of the main page. Enter a username and password, check that you agree with the legal terms, select the “Gimme a blog” bullet, and click Next. WordPress may inform you that your username is already taken, simply choose a new one and try again. Next, choose a domain for your blog.  This will be the address for your site, and cannot be changed, so be sure to choose exactly what you want.  If you’d prefer your address to be yourname.com instead of yourname.wordpress.com, you can add your own domain for a fee after your blog is setup…but we’ll cover that later. Once you click signup, you will be sent a confirmation email.  While you wait for the email to arrive you can go ahead and enter in your name and a short bio about yourself. When you receive your confirmation email, click the link.  Congratulations; you now have your own blog! You can view your new blog immediately, though the default theme isn’t very interesting without your content and pictures. Back on the page you opened from the email, click Login to access your blog’s administration page and to start adding stuff to your blog.  You can also access your blog’s admin page anytime by from yourname.wordpress.com/admin, substituting your own blog name for yourname. Enter your username and password, then click Log in to get started. Adding Content to your WordPress.com Blog When you sign in to your WordPress blog, you’ll first see the WordPress Admin page.  Here you can see recent posts and comments, and you can see stats of how many people have visited your site.  You can also access all of your blog tools and settings right from this page. To add a new post to your blog, click the Posts link on the left, then click “Add New” either on the left menu or on the top of the Edit Posts page.  Or, if you want to edit the default first post, hover over it and select Edit. Or click the New Posts button on the top of the page.  This menu bar is always visible whenever you’re logged in, so it’s an easy way to add a post. The editor lets you easily write anything you want in a Microsoft Word-style editor.  You can format your text, add lists, links, quotes, and more.  When you’re ready to share your content with the world, click Publish on the right side. To add pictures or other files, click the picture icon beside “Upload/Insert”.  Your free blog account can store up to 3Gb of pictures and documents which will definitely give you a good start. Click Select Files, and then choose the pictures or documents you want to add to your post. When the pictures have uploaded, you can add a caption and choose how to position the picture.  When you’re finished, select “Insert into Post”.   Or, if you want to add a video, click the video button.  You have to add a paid upgrade to upload videos directly, but you can add YouTube and other online videos for free. Click the “From URL” tab, and then paste the link to the YouTube video and click Insert into post. If you’re a code geek, click the HTML tab in the editor and edit the HTML of your blog post the geeky way. Once you’ve added all your content and edited it the way you want, click the Publish button on the right of the editor.  Or, you can click Preview to make sure it looks right, and then click Publish. Here’s our blog with the new blog post containing a picture and video.  While you’re getting to know you’re way around the controls in WordPress, the Preview feature will be your best friend while you try to organize the content to your liking.   Conclusion It only takes a couple minutes to get started blogging at WordPress.com. Whether you want to write about your daily life, share pictures of your children, or review the latest books and gadgets, WordPress.com is a great place to get started for free.  But we’ve only covered a small portion of the WordPress features…but this should get you started. Check back for more WordPress and blogging coverage coming up soon! Links Signup for a free WordPress.com account Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Add Social Bookmarking (Digg This!) Links to your Wordpress BlogHow-To Geek SoftwareProtecting Your WordPress Admin Panel From Hackers With .htaccessMake a Backup Copy of your Production Wordpress Blog on UbuntuLinux QuickTip: Downloading and Un-tarring in One Step TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Awe inspiring, inter-galactic theme (Win 7) Case Study – How to Optimize Popular Wordpress Sites Restore Hidden Updates in Windows 7 & Vista Iceland an Insurance Job? Find Downloads and Add-ins for Outlook Recycle !

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• Using jQuery and SPServices to Display List Items

  - by Bil Simser

  I had an interesting challenge recently that I turned to Marc Anderson’s wonderful SPServices project for. If you haven’t already seen or used SPServices, please do. It’s a jQuery library that does primarily two things. First, it wraps up all of the SharePoint web services in a nice little AJAX wrapper for use in JavaScript. Second, it enhances the form editing of items in SharePoint so you’re not hacking up your List Form pages. My challenge was simple but interesting. The user wanted to display a SharePoint item page (DispForm.aspx, which already had some customization on it to display related items via this blog post from Codeless Solutions for SharePoint) but launch from an external application using the value of one of the fields in the SharePoint list. For simplicity let’s say my list is a list of customers and the related list is a list of orders for that customer. It would look something like this (click on the item to see the full image): Your first thought might be, that’s easy! Display the customer information using a DataView Web Part and filter the item using a query string to match the customer number. However there are a few problems with this idea: You’ll need to build a custom page and then attach that related orders view to it. This is a bit of a problem because the solution from Codeless Solutions relies on the Title field on the page to be displayed. On a custom page you would have to recreate all of the elements found on the DispForm.aspx page so the related view would work. The DataView Web Part doesn’t look *exactly* like what the out of the box display form page does. Not a huge problem and can be overcome with some CSS style overrides but still, more work. A DVWP showing a single record doesn’t have the same toolbar that you would using the DispForm.aspx. Not a show-stopper and you can rebuild the toolbar but it’s going to potentially require code and then there’s the security trimming, etc. that you have to get right. DVWPs are not automatically updated if you add a column to the list like DispForm.aspx is. Work, work, work. For these reasons I thought it would be easier to take the already existing (modified) DispForm.aspx page and just add some jQuery magic to the page to find the item. Why do we need to find it? DispForm.aspx relies on a querystring parameter called “ID” which then displays whatever that item ID number is in the list. Trouble is, when you’re coming in from an external app via a link, you don’t know what that internal ID is (and frankly shouldn’t). I don’t like exposing internal SharePoint IDs to the outside world for the same reason I don’t do it with database IDs. They’re internal and while it’s find to use on the site itself you don’t want external links using it. It’s volatile and can change (delete one item then re-add it back with the same data and watch any ID references break). The next thought might be to call a SharePoint web service with a CAML query to get the item ID number using some criteria (in this case, the customer number). That’s great if you have that ability but again we had an existing application we were just adding a link to. The last thing I wanted to do was to crack open the code on that sucker and start calling web services (primarily because it’s Java, but really I’m a lazy geek). However if you’re doing this and have access to call a web service that would be an option. Back to this problem, how do I a) find a SharePoint List Item based on some field value other than ID and b) make it low impact so I can just construct a URL to it? That’s where jQuery and SPServices came to the rescue. After spending a few hours of emails back and forth with Marc and a couple of phone calls (and updating jQuery to the latest version, duh!) it was a simple answer. First we need a reference to a) jQuery b) SPServices and c) our script. I just dropped a Content Editor Web Part, the Swiss Army Knives of Web Parts, onto the DispForm.aspx page and added these lines: <script type="text/javascript" src="http://intranet/JavaScript/jquery-1.4.2.min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://intranet/JavaScript/jquery.SPServices-0.5.3.min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://intranet/JavaScript/RedirectToID.js"> </script> Update it to point to where you keep your scripts located. I prefer to keep them all in Document Libraries as I can make changes to them without having to remote into the server (and on a multiple web front end, that’s just a PITA), it provides me with version control of sorts, and it’s quick to add new plugins and scripts. Now we can look at our RedirectToID.js script. This invokes the SPServices Library to call the GetListItems method of the Lists web service and then rewrites the URL to DispForm.aspx to use the correct SharePoint ID (the internal one). $(document).ready(function(){ var queryStringValues = $().SPServices.SPGetQueryString(); var id = queryStringValues["ID"]; if(id == "0") { var customer = queryStringValues["CustomerNumber"]; var query = "<Query><Where><Eq><FieldRef Name='CustomerNumber'/><Value Type='Text'>" + customer + "</Value></Eq></Where></Query>"; var url = window.location; $().SPServices({ operation: "GetListItems", listName: "Customers", async: false, CAMLQuery: query, completefunc: function (xData, Status) { $(xData.responseXML).find("[nodeName=z:row]").each(function(){ id = $(this).attr("ows_ID"); url = $().SPServices.SPGetCurrentSite() + "/Lists/Customers/DispForm.aspx?ID=" + id; window.location = url; }); } }); } }); What’s happening here? Line 3: We call SPServices.SPGetQueryString to get an array of query string values (a handy function in the library as I had 15 lines of code to do this which is now gone). Line 4: Extract the ID value from the query string Line 6: If we pass in “0” it means we’re looking up a field value. This allows DispForm.aspx to work like normal with SharePoint lists but lookup our values when invoked. Why ID at all? DispForm.aspx doesn’t work unless you pass in something and “0” is a *magic* number that will invoke the page but not lookup a value in the database. Line 8-15: Extract the CustomerNumber query string value, build a CAML query to find it then call the GetListitems method using SPServices Line 16: Process the results in our completefunc to iterate over all the rows (there should only be one) and extract the real ID of the item Line 17-20: Build a new URL based on the site (using a call to SPGetCurrentSite) and append our real ID to redirect to the DispForm.aspx page As you can see, it dynamically creates a CAML query for the call to the web service using the passed in value. You could even make this generic to take in different query strings, one for the field name to search for and the other for the value to find. That way it could be used for any field you want. For example you could bring up the correct item on the DispForm.aspx page based on customer name with something like this: http://myserver/Lists/Customers/DispForm.aspx?ID=0&FilterId=CustomerName&FilterValue=Sony Use your imagination. Some people would opt for building a custom page with a DVWP but if you want to leverage all the functionality of DispForm.aspx this might come in handy if you don’t want to rely on internal SharePoint IDs.

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• ASP.NET MVC 3 Hosting :: New Features in ASP.NET MVC 3

  - by mbridge

  Razor View Engine The Razor view engine is a new view engine option for ASP.NET MVC that supports the Razor templating syntax. The Razor syntax is a streamlined approach to HTML templating designed with the goal of being a code driven minimalist templating approach that builds on existing C#, VB.NET and HTML knowledge. The result of this approach is that Razor views are very lean and do not contain unnecessary constructs that get in the way of you and your code. ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 only supports C# Razor views which use the .cshtml file extension. VB.NET support will be enabled in later releases of ASP.NET MVC 3. For more information and examples, see Introducing “Razor” – a new view engine for ASP.NET on Scott Guthrie’s blog. Dynamic View and ViewModel Properties A new dynamic View property is available in views, which provides access to the ViewData object using a simpler syntax. For example, imagine two items are added to the ViewData dictionary in the Index controller action using code like the following: public ActionResult Index() {          ViewData["Title"] = "The Title";          ViewData["Message"] = "Hello World!"; } Those properties can be accessed in the Index view using code like this: <h2>View.Title</h2> <p>View.Message</p> There is also a new dynamic ViewModel property in the Controller class that lets you add items to the ViewData dictionary using a simpler syntax. Using the previous controller example, the two values added to the ViewData dictionary can be rewritten using the following code: public ActionResult Index() {     ViewModel.Title = "The Title";     ViewModel.Message = "Hello World!"; } “Add View” Dialog Box Supports Multiple View Engines The Add View dialog box in Visual Studio includes extensibility hooks that allow it to support multiple view engines, as shown in the following figure: Service Location and Dependency Injection Support ASP.NET MVC 3 introduces improved support for applying Dependency Injection (DI) via Inversion of Control (IoC) containers. ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 provides the following hooks for locating services and injecting dependencies: - Creating controller factories. - Creating controllers and setting dependencies. - Setting dependencies on view pages for both the Web Form view engine and the Razor view engine (for types that derive from ViewPage, ViewUserControl, ViewMasterPage, WebViewPage). - Setting dependencies on action filters. Using a Dependency Injection container is not required in order for ASP.NET MVC 3 to function properly. Global Filters ASP.NET MVC 3 allows you to register filters that apply globally to all controller action methods. Adding a filter to the global filters collection ensures that the filter runs for all controller requests. To register an action filter globally, you can make the following call in the Application_Start method in the Global.asax file: GlobalFilters.Filters.Add(new MyActionFilter()); The source of global action filters is abstracted by the new IFilterProvider interface, which can be registered manually or by using Dependency Injection. This allows you to provide your own source of action filters and choose at run time whether to apply a filter to an action in a particular request. New JsonValueProviderFactory Class The new JsonValueProviderFactory class allows action methods to receive JSON-encoded data and model-bind it to an action-method parameter. This is useful in scenarios such as client templating. Client templates enable you to format and display a single data item or set of data items by using a fragment of HTML. ASP.NET MVC 3 lets you connect client templates easily with an action method that both returns and receives JSON data. Support for .NET Framework 4 Validation Attributes and IvalidatableObject The ValidationAttribute class was improved in the .NET Framework 4 to enable richer support for validation. When you write a custom validation attribute, you can use a new IsValid overload that provides a ValidationContext instance. This instance provides information about the current validation context, such as what object is being validated. This change enables scenarios such as validating the current value based on another property of the model. The following example shows a sample custom attribute that ensures that the value of PropertyOne is always larger than the value of PropertyTwo: public class CompareValidationAttribute : ValidationAttribute {     protected override ValidationResult IsValid(object value,              ValidationContext validationContext) {         var model = validationContext.ObjectInstance as SomeModel;         if (model.PropertyOne > model.PropertyTwo) {            return ValidationResult.Success;         }         return new ValidationResult("PropertyOne must be larger than PropertyTwo");     } } Validation in ASP.NET MVC also supports the .NET Framework 4 IValidatableObject interface. This interface allows your model to perform model-level validation, as in the following example: public class SomeModel : IValidatableObject {     public int PropertyOne { get; set; }     public int PropertyTwo { get; set; }     public IEnumerable<ValidationResult> Validate(ValidationContext validationContext) {         if (PropertyOne <= PropertyTwo) {            yield return new ValidationResult(                "PropertyOne must be larger than PropertyTwo");         }     } } New IClientValidatable Interface The new IClientValidatable interface allows the validation framework to discover at run time whether a validator has support for client validation. This interface is designed to be independent of the underlying implementation; therefore, where you implement the interface depends on the validation framework in use. For example, for the default data annotations-based validator, the interface would be applied on the validation attribute. Support for .NET Framework 4 Metadata Attributes ASP.NET MVC 3 now supports .NET Framework 4 metadata attributes such as DisplayAttribute. New IMetadataAware Interface The new IMetadataAware interface allows you to write attributes that simplify how you can contribute to the ModelMetadata creation process. Before this interface was available, you needed to write a custom metadata provider in order to have an attribute provide extra metadata. This interface is consumed by the AssociatedMetadataProvider class, so support for the IMetadataAware interface is automatically inherited by all classes that derive from that class (notably, the DataAnnotationsModelMetadataProvider class). New Action Result Types In ASP.NET MVC 3, the Controller class includes two new action result types and corresponding helper methods. HttpNotFoundResult Action The new HttpNotFoundResult action result is used to indicate that a resource requested by the current URL was not found. The status code is 404. This class derives from HttpStatusCodeResult. The Controller class includes an HttpNotFound method that returns an instance of this action result type, as shown in the following example: public ActionResult List(int id) {     if (id < 0) {                 return HttpNotFound();     }     return View(); } HttpStatusCodeResult Action The new HttpStatusCodeResult action result is used to set the response status code and description. Permanent Redirect The HttpRedirectResult class has a new Boolean Permanent property that is used to indicate whether a permanent redirect should occur. A permanent redirect uses the HTTP 301 status code. Corresponding to this change, the Controller class now has several methods for performing permanent redirects: - RedirectPermanent - RedirectToRoutePermanent - RedirectToActionPermanent These methods return an instance of HttpRedirectResult with the Permanent property set to true. Breaking Changes The order of execution for exception filters has changed for exception filters that have the same Order value. In ASP.NET MVC 2 and earlier, exception filters on the controller with the same Order as those on an action method were executed before the exception filters on the action method. This would typically be the case when exception filters were applied without a specified order Order value. In MVC 3, this order has been reversed in order to allow the most specific exception handler to execute first. As in earlier versions, if the Order property is explicitly specified, the filters are run in the specified order. Known Issues When you are editing a Razor view (CSHTML file), the Go To Controller menu item in Visual Studio will not be available, and there are no code snippets.

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• Multi-tenant ASP.NET MVC – Introduction

  - by zowens

  I’ve read a few different blogs that talk about multi-tenancy and how to resolve some of the issues surrounding multi-tenancy. What I’ve come to realize is that these implementations overcomplicate the issues and give only a muddy implementation! I’ve seen some really illogical code out there. I have recently been building a multi-tenancy framework for internal use at eagleenvision.net. Through this process, I’ve realized a few different techniques to make building multi-tenant applications actually quite easy. I will be posting a few different entries over the issue and my personal implementation. In this first post, I will discuss what multi-tenancy means and how my implementation will be structured.   So what’s the problem? Here’s the deal. Multi-tenancy is basically a technique of code-reuse of web application code. A multi-tenant application is an application that runs a single instance for multiple clients. Here the “client” is different URL bindings on IIS using ASP.NET MVC. The problem with different instances of the, essentially, same application is that you have to spin up different instances of ASP.NET. As the number of running instances of ASP.NET grows, so does the memory footprint of IIS. Stack Exchange shifted its architecture to multi-tenancy March. As the blog post explains, multi-tenancy saves cost in terms of memory utilization and physical disc storage. If you use the same code base for many applications, multi-tenancy just makes sense. You’ll reduce the amount of work it takes to synchronize the site implementations and you’ll thank your lucky stars later for choosing to use one application for multiple sites. Multi-tenancy allows the freedom of extensibility while relying on some pre-built code.   You’d think this would be simple. I have actually seen a real lack of reference material on the subject in terms of ASP.NET MVC. This is somewhat surprising given the number of users of ASP.NET MVC. However, I will certainly fill the void ;). Implementing a multi-tenant application takes a little thinking. It’s not straight-forward because the possibilities of implementation are endless. I have yet to see a great implementation of a multi-tenant MVC application. The only one that comes close to what I have in mind is Rob Ashton’s implementation (all the entries are listed on this page). There’s some really nasty code in there… something I’d really like to avoid. He has also written a library (MvcEx) that attempts to aid multi-tenant development. This code is even worse, in my honest opinion. Once I start seeing Reflection.Emit, I have to assume the worst :) In all seriousness, if his implementation makes sense to you, use it! It’s a fine implementation that should be given a look. At least look at the code. I will reference MvcEx going forward as a comparison to my implementation. I will explain why my approach differs from MvcEx and how it is better or worse (hopefully better).   Core Goals of my Multi-Tenant Implementation The first, and foremost, goal is to use Inversion of Control containers to my advantage. As you will see throughout this series, I pass around containers quite frequently and rely on their use heavily. I will be using StructureMap in my implementation. However, you could probably use your favorite IoC tool instead. <RANT> However, please don’t be stupid and abstract your IoC tool. Each IoC is powerful and by abstracting the capabilities, you’re doing yourself a real disservice. Who in the world swaps out IoC tools…? No one!</RANT> (It had to be said.) I will outline some of the goodness of StructureMap as we go along. This is really an invaluable tool in my tool belt and simple to use in my multi-tenant implementation. The second core goal is to represent a tenant as easily as possible. Just as a dependency container will be a first-class citizen, so will a tenant. This allows us to easily extend and use tenants. This will also allow different ways of “plugging in” tenants into your application. In my implementation, there will be a single dependency container for a single tenant. This will enable isolation of the dependencies of the tenant. The third goal is to use composition as a means to delegate “core” functions out to the tenant. More on this later.   Features In MvcExt, “Modules” are a code element of the infrastructure. I have simplified this concept and have named this “Features”. A feature is a simple element of an application. Controllers can be specified to have a feature and actions can have “sub features”. Each tenant can select features it needs and the other features will be hidden to the tenant’s users. My implementation doesn’t require something to be a feature. A controller can be common to all tenants. For example, (as you will see) I have a “Content” controller that will return the CSS, Javascript and Images for a tenant. This is common logic to all tenants and shouldn’t be hidden or considered a “feature”; Content is a core component.   Up next My next post will be all about the code. I will reveal some of the foundation to the way I do multi-tenancy. I will have posts dedicated to Foundation, Controllers, Views, Caching, Content and how to setup the tenants. Each post will be in-depth about the issues and implementation details, while adhering to my core goals outlined in this post. As always, comment with questions of DM me on twitter or send me an email.

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• Ajax Control Toolkit Now Supports jQuery

  - by Stephen.Walther

  I’m excited to announce the September 2013 release of the Ajax Control Toolkit, which now supports building new Ajax Control Toolkit controls with jQuery. You can download the latest release of the Ajax Control Toolkit from http://AjaxControlToolkit.CodePlex.com or you can install the Ajax Control Toolkit directly within Visual Studio by executing the following NuGet command: The New jQuery Extender Base Class This release of the Ajax Control Toolkit introduces a new jQueryExtender base class. This new base class enables you to create Ajax Control Toolkit controls with jQuery instead of the Microsoft Ajax Library. Currently, only one control in the Ajax Control Toolkit has been rewritten to use the new jQueryExtender base class (only one control has been jQueryized). The ToggleButton control is the first of the Ajax Control Toolkit controls to undergo this dramatic transformation. All of the other controls in the Ajax Control Toolkit are written using the Microsoft Ajax Library. We hope to gradually rewrite these controls as jQuery controls over time. You can view the new jQuery ToggleButton live at the Ajax Control Toolkit sample site: http://www.asp.net/ajaxLibrary/AjaxControlToolkitSampleSite/ToggleButton/ToggleButton.aspx Why are we rewriting Ajax Control Toolkits with jQuery? There are very few developers actively working with the Microsoft Ajax Library while there are thousands of developers actively working with jQuery. Because we want talented developers in the community to continue to contribute to the Ajax Control Toolkit, and because almost all JavaScript developers are familiar with jQuery, it makes sense to support jQuery with the Ajax Control Toolkit. Also, we believe that the Ajax Control Toolkit is a great framework for Web Forms developers who want to build new ASP.NET controls that use JavaScript. The Ajax Control Toolkit has great features such as automatic bundling, minification, caching, and compression. We want to make it easy for ASP.NET developers to build new controls that take advantage of these features. Instantiating Controls with data-* Attributes We took advantage of the new JQueryExtender base class to change the way that Ajax Control Toolkit controls are instantiated. In the past, adding an Ajax Control Toolkit to a page resulted in inline JavaScript being injected into the page. For example, adding the ToggleButton control to a page injected the following HTML and script: <input id="ctl00_SampleContent_CheckBox1" name="ctl00$SampleContent$CheckBox1" type="checkbox" checked="checked" /> <script type="text/javascript"> //<![CDATA[ Sys.Application.add_init(function() { $create(Sys.Extended.UI.ToggleButtonBehavior, {"CheckedImageAlternateText":"Check", "CheckedImageUrl":"ToggleButton_Checked.gif", "ImageHeight":19, "ImageWidth":19, "UncheckedImageAlternateText":"UnCheck", "UncheckedImageUrl":"ToggleButton_Unchecked.gif", "id":"ctl00_SampleContent_ToggleButtonExtender1"}, null, null, $get("ctl00_SampleContent_CheckBox1")); }); //]]> </script> Notice the call to the JavaScript $create() method at the bottom of the page. When using the Microsoft Ajax Library, this call to the $create() method is necessary to create the Ajax Control Toolkit control. This inline script looks pretty ugly to a modern JavaScript developer. Inline script! Horrible! The jQuery version of the ToggleButton injects the following HTML and script into the page: <input id="ctl00_SampleContent_CheckBox1" name="ctl00$SampleContent$CheckBox1" type="checkbox" checked="checked" data-act-togglebuttonextender="imageWidth:19, imageHeight:19, uncheckedImageUrl:'ToggleButton_Unchecked.gif', checkedImageUrl:'ToggleButton_Checked.gif', uncheckedImageAlternateText:'I don&#39;t understand why you don&#39;t like ASP.NET', checkedImageAlternateText:'It&#39;s really nice to hear from you that you like ASP.NET'" /> Notice that there is no script! There is no call to the $create() method. In fact, there is no inline JavaScript at all. The jQuery version of the ToggleButton uses an HTML5 data-* attribute instead of an inline script. The ToggleButton control is instantiated with a data-act-togglebuttonextender attribute. Using data-* attributes results in much cleaner markup (You don’t need to feel embarrassed when selecting View Source in your browser). Ajax Control Toolkit versus jQuery So in a jQuery world why is the Ajax Control Toolkit needed at all? Why not just use jQuery plugins instead of the Ajax Control Toolkit? For example, there are lots of jQuery ToggleButton plugins floating around the Internet. Why not just use one of these jQuery plugins instead of using the Ajax Control Toolkit ToggleButton control? There are three main reasons why the Ajax Control Toolkit continues to be valuable in a jQuery world: Ajax Control Toolkit controls run on both the server and client jQuery plugins are client only. A jQuery plugin does not include any server-side code. If you need to perform any work on the server – think of the AjaxFileUpload control – then you can’t use a pure jQuery solution. Ajax Control Toolkit controls provide a better Visual Studio experience You don’t get any design time experience when you use jQuery plugins within Visual Studio. Ajax Control Toolkit controls, on the other hand, are designed to work with Visual Studio. For example, you can use the Visual Studio Properties window to set Ajax Control Toolkit control properties. Ajax Control Toolkit controls shield you from working with JavaScript I like writing code in JavaScript. However, not all developers like JavaScript and some developers want to completely avoid writing any JavaScript code at all. The Ajax Control Toolkit enables you to take advantage of JavaScript (and the latest features of HTML5) in your ASP.NET Web Forms websites without writing a single line of JavaScript. Better ToolkitScriptManager Documentation With this release, we have added more detailed documentation for using the ToolkitScriptManager. In particular, we added documentation that describes how to take advantage of the new bundling, minification, compression, and caching features of the Ajax Control Toolkit. The ToolkitScriptManager documentation is part of the Ajax Control Toolkit sample site and it can be read here: http://www.asp.net/ajaxLibrary/AjaxControlToolkitSampleSite/ToolkitScriptManager/ToolkitScriptManager.aspx Other Fixes This release of the Ajax Control Toolkit includes several important bug fixes. For example, the Ajax Control Toolkit Twitter control was completely rewritten with this release. Twitter is in the process of retiring the first version of their API. You can read about their plans here: https://dev.twitter.com/blog/planning-for-api-v1-retirement We completely rewrote the Ajax Control Toolkit Twitter control to use the new Twitter API. To take advantage of the new Twitter API, you must get a key and access token from Twitter and add the key and token to your web.config file. Detailed instructions for using the new version of the Ajax Control Toolkit Twitter control can be found here: http://www.asp.net/ajaxLibrary/AjaxControlToolkitSampleSite/Twitter/Twitter.aspx   Summary We’ve made some really great changes to the Ajax Control Toolkit over the last two releases to modernize the toolkit. In the previous release, we updated the Ajax Control Toolkit to use a better bundling, minification, compression, and caching system. With this release, we updated the Ajax Control Toolkit to support jQuery. We also continue to update the Ajax Control Toolkit with important bug fixes. I hope you like these changes and I look forward to hearing your feedback.

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• Week in Geek: New Security Flaw Confirmed for Internet Explorer Edition

  - by Asian Angel

  This week we learned how to use a PC to stay entertained while traveling for the holidays, create quality photo prints with free software, share links between any browser and any smartphone, create perfect Christmas photos using How-To Geek’s 10 best how-to photo guides, and had fun decorating Firefox with a collection of Holiday 2010 Personas themes. Photo by Repoort. Random Geek Links Photo by Asian Angel. Critical 0-Day Flaw Affects All Internet Explorer Versions, Microsoft Warns Microsoft has confirmed a zero-day vulnerability affecting all supported versions of Internet Explorer, including IE8, IE7 and IE6. Note: Article contains link to Microsoft Security Advisory detailing two work-arounds until a security update is released. Hackers targeting human rights, indie media groups Hackers are increasingly hitting the Web sites of human rights and independent media groups in an attempt to silence them, says a new study released this week by Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. OpenBSD: audits give no indication of back doors So far, the analyses of OpenBSD’s crypto and IPSec code have not provided any indication that the system contains back doors for listening to encrypted VPN connections. But the developers have already found two bugs during their current audits. Sophos: Beware Facebook’s new facial-recognition feature Facebook’s new facial recognition software might result in undesirable photos of users being circulated online, warned a security expert, who urged users to keep abreast with the social network’s privacy settings to prevent the abovementioned scenario from becoming a reality. Microsoft withdraws flawed Outlook update Microsoft has withdrawn update KB2412171 for Outlook 2007, released last Patch Tuesday, after a number of user complaints. Skype: Millions still without service Skype was still working to right itself going into the holiday weekend from a major outage that began this past Wednesday. Mozilla improves sync setup and WebGL in Firefox 4 beta 8 Firefox 4.0 beta 8 brings better support for WebGL and introduces an improved setup process for Firefox Sync that simplifies the steps for configuring the synchronization service across multiple devices. Chrome OS the litmus test for cloud The success or failure of Google’s browser-oriented Chrome OS will be the litmus test to decide if the cloud is capable of addressing user needs for content and services, according to a new Ovum report released Monday. FCC Net neutrality rules reach mobile apps The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) finally released its long-expected regulations on Thursday and the related explanations total a whopping 194 pages. One new item that was not previously disclosed: mobile wireless providers can’t block “applications that compete with the provider’s” own voice or video telephony services. KDE and the Document Foundation join Open Invention Network The KDE e.V. and the Document Foundation (TDF) have both joined the Open Invention Network (OIN) as licensees, expanding the organization’s roster of supporters. Report: SEC looks into Hurd’s ousting from HP The scandal surrounding Mark Hurd’s departure from the world’s largest technology company in August has officially drawn attention from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Report: Google requests delay of new Google TVs Google TV is apparently encountering a bit of static that has resulted in a programming change. Geek Video of the Week This week we have a double dose of geeky video goodness for you with the original Mac vs PC video and the trailer for the sequel. Photo courtesy of Peacer. Mac vs PC Photo courtesy of Peacer. Mac vs PC 2 Trailer Random TinyHacker Links Awesome Tools To Extract Audio From Video Here’s a list of really useful, and free tools to rip audio from videos. Getting Your iPhone Out of Recovery Mode Is your iPhone stuck in recovery mode? This tutorial will help you get it out of that state. Google Shared Spaces Quickly create a shared space and collaborate with friends online. McAfee Internet Security 2011 – Upgrade not worthy of a version change McAfee has released their 2011 version of security products. And as this review details, the upgrades are minimal when compared to their 2010 products. For more information, check out the review. 200 Countries Plotted Hans Rosling’s famous lectures combine enormous quantities of public data with a sport’s commentator’s style to reveal the story of the world’s past, present and future development. Now he explores stats in a way he has never done before – using augmented reality animation. Super User Questions Enjoy looking through this week’s batch of popular questions and answers from Super User. How to restore windows 7 to a known working state every time it boots? Is there an easy way to mass-transfer all files between two computers? Coffee spilled inside computer, damaged hard drive Computer does not boot after ram upgrade Keyboard not detected when trying to install Ubuntu 10.10 How-To Geek Weekly Article Recap Have you had a super busy week while preparing for the holiday weekend? Then here is your chance to get caught up on your reading with our five hottest articles for the week. Ask How-To Geek: Rescuing an Infected PC, Installing Bloat-free iTunes, and Taming a Crazy Trackpad How to Use the Avira Rescue CD to Clean Your Infected PC Eight Geektacular Christmas Projects for Your Day Off VirtualBox 4.0 Rocks Extensions and a Simplified GUI Ask the Readers: How Many Monitors Do You Use with Your Computer? One Year Ago on How-To Geek Here are more great articles from one year ago for you to read and enjoy during the holiday break. Enjoy Distraction-Free Writing with WriteMonkey Shutter is a State of Art Screenshot Tool for Ubuntu Get Hex & RGB Color Codes the Easy Way Find User Scripts for Your Favorite Websites the Easy Way Access Your Unsorted Bookmarks the Easy Way (Firefox) The Geek Note That “wraps” things up for this week and we hope that everyone enjoys the rest of their holiday break! Found a great tip during the break? Then be sure to send it in to us at [email protected]. Photo by ArSiSa7. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How to Use the Avira Rescue CD to Clean Your Infected PC The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials Is Your Desktop Printer More Expensive Than Printing Services? 20 OS X Keyboard Shortcuts You Might Not Know HTG Explains: Which Linux File System Should You Choose? HTG Explains: Why Does Photo Paper Improve Print Quality? Simon’s Cat Explores the Christmas Tree! [Video] The Outdoor Lights Scene from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation [Video] The Famous Home Alone Pizza Delivery Scene [Classic Video] Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader Theme for Windows 7 Cardinal and Rabbit Sharing a Tree on a Cold Winter Morning Wallpaper An Alternate Star Wars Christmas Special [Video]

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• Week in Geek: 4chan Falls Victim to DDoS Attack Edition

  - by Asian Angel

  This week we learned how to tweak the low battery action on a Windows 7 laptop, access an eBook collection anywhere in the world, “extend iPad battery life, batch resize photos, & sync massive music collections”, went on a reign of destruction with Snow Crusher, and had fun decorating our desktops with abstract icon collections. Photo by pasukaru76. Random Geek Links We have included extra news article goodness to help you catch up on any developments that you may have missed during the holiday break this past week. Note: The three 27C3 articles listed here represent three different presentations at the 27th Chaos Communication Congress hacker conference. 4chan victim of DDoS as FBI investigates role in PayPal attack Users of 4chan may have gotten a taste of their own medicine after the site was knocked offline by a DDoS attack from an unknown origin early Thursday morning. Report: FBI seizes server in probe of WikiLeaks attacks The FBI has seized a server in Texas as part of its hunt for the groups behind the pro-WikiLeaks denial-of-service attacks launched in December against PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, and others. Mozilla exposes older user-account database Mozilla has disabled 44,000 older user accounts for its Firefox add-ons site after a security researcher found part of a database of the account information on a publicly available server. Data breach affects 4.9 million Honda customers Japanese automaker Honda has put some 2.2 million customers in the United States on a security breach alert after a database containing information on the owners and their cars was hacked. Chinese Trojan discovered in Android games An Android-based Trojan called “Geinimi” has been discovered in the wild and the Trojan is capable of sending personal information to remote servers and exhibits botnet-like behavior. 27C3 presentation claims many mobiles vulnerable to SMS attacks According to security experts, an ‘SMS of death’ threatens to disable many current Sony Ericsson, Samsung, Motorola, Micromax and LG mobiles. 27C3: GSM cell phones even easier to tap Security researchers have demonstrated how open source software on a number of revamped, entry-level cell phones can decrypt and record mobile phone calls in the GSM network. 27C3: danger lurks in PDF documents Security researcher Julia Wolf has pointed out numerous, previously hardly known, security problems in connection with Adobe’s PDF standard. Critical update for WordPress A critical update has been made available for WordPress in the form of version 3.0.4. The update fixes a security bug in WordPress’s KSES library. McAfee Labs Predicts Geolocation, Mobile Devices and Apple Will Top the List of Targets for Emerging Threats in 2011 The list comprises 2010’s most buzzed about platforms and services, including Google’s Android, Apple’s iPhone, foursquare, Google TV and the Mac OS X platform, which are all expected to become major targets for cybercriminals. McAfee Labs also predicts that politically motivated attacks will be on the rise. Windows Phone 7 piracy materializes with FreeMarketplace A proof-of-concept application, FreeMarketplace, that allows any Windows Phone 7 application to be downloaded and installed free of charge has been developed. Empty email accounts, and some bad buzz for Hotmail In the past few days, a number of Hotmail users have been complaining about a rather disconcerting issue: their Hotmail accounts, some up to 10 years old, appear completely empty.  No emails, no folders, nothing, just what appears to be a new account. Reports: Nintendo warns of 3DS risk for kids Nintendo has reportedly issued a warning that the 3DS, its eagerly awaited glasses-free 3D portable gaming device, should not be used by children under 6 when the gadget is in 3D-viewing mode. Google eyes ‘cloaking’ as next antispam target Google plans to take a closer look at the practice of “cloaking,” or presenting one look to a Googlebot crawling one’s site while presenting another look to users. Facebook, Twitter stock trading drawing SEC eye? The high degree of investor interest in shares of hot Silicon Valley companies that aren’t yet publicly traded–like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Zynga–may be leading to scrutiny from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Random TinyHacker Links Photo by jcraveiro. Exciting Software Set for Release in 2011 A few bloggers from great websites such as How-To Geek, Guiding Tech and 7 Tutorials took the time to sit down and talk about their software wishes for 2011. Take the time to read it and share… Wikileaks Infopr0n An infographic detailing the quest to plug WikiLeaks. The New York Times Guide to Mobile Apps A growing collection of all mobile app coverage by the New York Times as well as lists of favorite apps from Times writers. 7,000,000,000 (Video) A fascinating look at the world’s population via National Geographic Magazine. Super User Questions Check out the great answers to these hot questions from Super User. How to use a Personal computer as a Linux web server for development purposes? How to link processing power of old computers together? Free virtualization tool for testing suspicious files? Why do some actions not work with Remote Desktop? What is the simplest way to send a large batch of pictures to a distant friend or colleague? How-To Geek Weekly Article Recap Had a busy week and need to get caught up on your HTG reading? Then sit back and relax while enjoying these hot posts full of how-to roundup goodness. The 50 Best How-To Geek Windows Articles of 2010 The 20 Best How-To Geek Explainer Topics for 2010 The 20 Best How-To Geek Linux Articles of 2010 How to Search Just the Site You’re Viewing Using Google Search Ask the Readers: Backing Your Files Up – Local Storage versus the Cloud One Year Ago on How-To Geek Need more how-to geekiness for your weekend? Then look through this great batch of articles from one year ago that focus on dual-booting and O.S. installation goodness. Dual Boot Your Pre-Installed Windows 7 Computer with Vista Dual Boot Your Pre-Installed Windows 7 Computer with XP How To Setup a USB Flash Drive to Install Windows 7 Dual Boot Your Pre-Installed Windows 7 Computer with Ubuntu Easily Install Ubuntu Linux with Windows Using the Wubi Installer The Geek Note We hope that you and your families have had a terrific holiday break as everyone prepares to return to work and school this week. Remember to keep those great tips coming in to us at [email protected]! Photo by pjbeardsley. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC The 20 Best How-To Geek Linux Articles of 2010 The 50 Best How-To Geek Windows Articles of 2010 The 20 Best How-To Geek Explainer Topics for 2010 How to Disable Caps Lock Key in Windows 7 or Vista How to Use the Avira Rescue CD to Clean Your Infected PC The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials Tune Pop Enhances Android Music Notifications Another Busy Night in Gotham City Wallpaper Classic Super Mario Brothers Theme for Chrome and Iron Experimental Firefox Builds Put Tabs on the Title Bar (Available for Download) Android Trojan Found in the Wild Chaos, Panic, and Disorder Wallpaper

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• Working with Silverlight DataGrid RowDetailsTemplate

  - by mohanbrij

  In this post I am going to show how we can use the Silverlight DataGrid RowDetails Template, Before I start I assume that you know basics of Silverlight and also know how you create a Silverlight Projects. I have started with the Silverlight Application, and kept all the default options before I created a Silverlight Project. After this I added a Silverlight DataGrid control to my MainForm.xaml page, using the DragDrop feature of Visual Studio IDE, this will help me to add the default namespace and references automatically. Just to give you a quick look of what exactly I am going to do, I will show you in the screen below my final target, before I start explaining rest of my codes. Before I start with the real code, first I have to do some ground work, as I am not getting the data from the DB, so I am creating a class where I will populate the dummy data. EmployeeData.cs public class EmployeeData { public string FirstName { get; set; } public string LastName { get; set; } public string Address { get; set; } public string City { get; set; } public string State { get; set; } public string Country { get; set; } public EmployeeData() { } public List<EmployeeData> GetEmployeeData() { List<EmployeeData> employees = new List<EmployeeData>(); employees.Add ( new EmployeeData { Address = "#407, PH1, Foyer Appartment", City = "Bangalore", Country = "India", FirstName = "Brij", LastName = "Mohan", State = "Karnataka" }); employees.Add ( new EmployeeData { Address = "#332, Dayal Niketan", City = "Jamshedpur", Country = "India", FirstName = "Arun", LastName = "Dayal", State = "Jharkhand" }); employees.Add ( new EmployeeData { Address = "#77, MSR Nagar", City = "Bangalore", Country = "India", FirstName = "Sunita", LastName = "Mohan", State = "Karnataka" }); return employees; } } The above class will give me some sample data, I think this will be good enough to start with the actual code. now I am giving below the XAML code from my MainForm.xaml First I will put the Silverlight DataGrid, <data:DataGrid x:Name="gridEmployee" CanUserReorderColumns="False" CanUserSortColumns="False" RowDetailsVisibilityMode="VisibleWhenSelected" HorizontalAlignment="Center" ScrollViewer.VerticalScrollBarVisibility="Auto" Height="200" AutoGenerateColumns="False" Width="350" VerticalAlignment="Center"> Here, the most important property which I am going to set is RowDetailsVisibilityMode="VisibleWhenSelected" This will display the RowDetails only when we select the desired Row. Other option we have in this is Collapsed and Visible. Which will either make the row details always Visible or Always Collapsed. but to get the real effect I have selected VisibleWhenSelected. Now I am going to put the rest of my XAML code. <data:DataGrid.Columns> <!--Begin FirstName Column--> <data:DataGridTextColumn Width="150" Header="First Name" Binding="{Binding FirstName}"/> <!--End FirstName Column--> <!--Begin LastName Column--> <data:DataGridTextColumn Width="150" Header="Last Name" Binding="{Binding LastName}"/> <!--End LastName Column--> </data:DataGrid.Columns> <data:DataGrid.RowDetailsTemplate> <!-- Begin row details section. --> <DataTemplate> <Border BorderBrush="Black" BorderThickness="1" Background="White"> <Grid> <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <ColumnDefinition Width="0.2*" /> <ColumnDefinition Width="0.8*" /> </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition /> <RowDefinition /> <RowDefinition /> <RowDefinition /> </Grid.RowDefinitions> <!-- Controls are bound to FullAddress properties. --> <TextBlock Text="Address : " Grid.Column="0" Grid.Row="0" /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Address}" Grid.Column="1" Grid.Row="0" /> <TextBlock Text="City : " Grid.Column="0" Grid.Row="1" /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding City}" Grid.Column="1" Grid.Row="1" /> <TextBlock Text="State : " Grid.Column="0" Grid.Row="2" /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding State}" Grid.Column="1" Grid.Row="2" /> <TextBlock Text="Country : " Grid.Column="0" Grid.Row="3" /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Country}" Grid.Column="1" Grid.Row="3" /> </Grid> </Border> </DataTemplate> <!-- End row details section. --> </data:DataGrid.RowDetailsTemplate>   In the code above, first I am declaring the simple dataGridTextColumn for FirstName and LastName, and after this I am creating the RowDetailTemplate, where we are just putting the code what we usually do to design the Grid. I mean nothing very much RowDetailTemplate Specific, most of the code which you will see inside the RowDetailsTemplate is plain and simple, where I am binding rest of the Address Column. And that,s it. Once we will bind the DataGrid, you are ready to go. In the code below from MainForm.xaml.cs, I am just binding the DataGrid public partial class MainPage : UserControl { public MainPage() { InitializeComponent(); BindControls(); } private void BindControls() { EmployeeData employees = new EmployeeData(); gridEmployee.ItemsSource = employees.GetEmployeeData(); } } Once you will run, you can see the output I have given in the screenshot above. In this example I have just shown the very basic example, now it up to your creativity and requirement, you can put some other controls like checkbox, Images, even other DataGrid, etc inside this RowDetailsTemplate column. I am attaching my sample source code with this post. I have used Silverlight 3 and Visual Studio 2008, but this is fully compatible with you Silverlight 4 and Visual Studio 2010. you may just need to Upgrade the attached Sample. You can download from here.

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• Ajax Control Toolkit and Superexpert

  - by Stephen Walther

  Microsoft has asked my company, Superexpert Consulting, to take ownership of the development and maintenance of the Ajax Control Toolkit moving forward. In this blog entry, I discuss our strategy for improving the Ajax Control Toolkit. Why the Ajax Control Toolkit? The Ajax Control Toolkit is one of the most popular projects on CodePlex. In fact, some have argued that it is among the most successful open-source projects of all time. It consistently receives over 3,500 downloads a day (not weekends -- workdays). A mind-boggling number of developers use the Ajax Control Toolkit in their ASP.NET Web Forms applications. Why does the Ajax Control Toolkit continue to be such a popular project? The Ajax Control Toolkit fills a strong need in the ASP.NET Web Forms world. The Toolkit enables Web Forms developers to build richly interactive JavaScript applications without writing any JavaScript. For example, by taking advantage of the Ajax Control Toolkit, a Web Forms developer can add modal dialogs, popup calendars, and client tabs to a web application simply by dragging web controls onto a page. The Ajax Control Toolkit is not for everyone. If you are comfortable writing JavaScript then I recommend that you investigate using jQuery plugins instead of the Ajax Control Toolkit. However, if you are a Web Forms developer and you don’t want to get your hands dirty writing JavaScript, then the Ajax Control Toolkit is a great solution. The Ajax Control Toolkit is Vast The Ajax Control Toolkit consists of 40 controls. That’s a lot of controls (For the sake of comparison, jQuery UI consists of only 8 controls – those slackers J). Furthermore, developers expect the Ajax Control Toolkit to work on browsers both old and new. For example, people expect the Ajax Control Toolkit to work with Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 9 and every version of Internet Explorer in between. People also expect the Ajax Control Toolkit to work on the latest versions of Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Google Chrome. And, people expect the Ajax Control Toolkit to work with different operating systems. Yikes, that is a lot of combinations. The biggest challenge which my company faces in supporting the Ajax Control Toolkit is ensuring that the Ajax Control Toolkit works across all of these different browsers and operating systems. Testing, Testing, Testing Because we wanted to ensure that we could easily test the Ajax Control Toolkit with different browsers, the very first thing that we did was to set up a dedicated testing server. The dedicated server -- named Schizo -- hosts 4 virtual machines so that we can run Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8, and Internet Explorer 9 at the same time (We also use the virtual machines to host the latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari). The five developers on our team (plus me) can each publish to a separate FTP website on the testing server. That way, we can quickly test how changes to the Ajax Control Toolkit affect different browsers. QUnit Tests for the Ajax Control Toolkit Introducing regressions – introducing new bugs when trying to fix existing bugs – is the concern which prevents me from sleeping well at night. There are so many people using the Ajax Control Toolkit in so many unique scenarios, that it is difficult to make improvements to the Ajax Control Toolkit without introducing regressions. In order to avoid regressions, we decided early on that it was extremely important to build good test coverage for the 40 controls in the Ajax Control Toolkit. We’ve been focusing a lot of energy on building automated JavaScript unit tests which we can use to help us discover regressions. We decided to write the unit tests with the QUnit test framework. We picked QUnit because it is quickly becoming the standard unit testing framework in the JavaScript world. For example, it is the unit testing framework used by the jQuery team, the jQuery UI team, and many jQuery UI plugin developers. We had to make several enhancements to the QUnit framework in order to test the Ajax Control Toolkit. For example, QUnit does not support tests which include postbacks. We modified the QUnit framework so that it works with IFrames so we could perform postbacks in our automated tests. At this point, we have written hundreds of QUnit tests. For example, we have written 135 QUnit tests for the Accordion control. The QUnit tests are included with the Ajax Control Toolkit source code in a project named AjaxControlToolkit.Tests. You can run all of the QUnit tests contained in the project by opening the Default.aspx page. Automating the QUnit Tests across Multiple Browsers Automated tests are useless if no one ever runs them. In order for the QUnit tests to be useful, we needed an easy way to run the tests automatically against a matrix of browsers. We wanted to run the unit tests against Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8, Internet Explorer 9, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari automatically. Expecting a developer to run QUnit tests against every browser after every check-in is just too much to expect. It takes 20 seconds to run the Accordion QUnit tests. We are testing against 8 browsers. That would require the developer to open 8 browsers and wait for the results after each change in code. Too much work. Therefore, we built a JavaScript Test Server. Our JavaScript Test Server project was inspired by John Resig’s TestSwarm project. The JavaScript Test Server runs our QUnit tests in a swarm of browsers (running on different operating systems) automatically. Here’s how the JavaScript Test Server works: 1. We created an ASP.NET page named RunTest.aspx that constantly polls the JavaScript Test Server for a new set of QUnit tests to run. After the RunTest.aspx page runs the QUnit tests, the RunTest.aspx records the test results back to the JavaScript Test Server. 2. We opened the RunTest.aspx page on instances of Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8, Internet Explorer 9, FireFox, Chrome, Opera, Google, and Safari. Now that we have the JavaScript Test Server setup, we can run all of our QUnit tests against all of the browsers which we need to support with a single click of a button. A New Release of the Ajax Control Toolkit Each Month The Ajax Control Toolkit Issue Tracker contains over one thousand five hundred open issues and feature requests. So we have plenty of work on our plates J At CodePlex, anyone can vote for an issue to be fixed. Originally, we planned to fix issues in order of their votes. However, we quickly discovered that this approach was inefficient. Constantly switching back and forth between different controls was too time-consuming. It takes time to re-familiarize yourself with a control. Instead, we decided to focus on two or three controls each month and really focus on fixing the issues with those controls. This way, we can fix sets of related issues and avoid the randomization caused by context switching. Our team works in monthly sprints. We plan to do another release of the Ajax Control Toolkit each and every month. So far, we have competed one release of the Ajax Control Toolkit which was released on April 1, 2011. We plan to release a new version in early May. Conclusion Fortunately, I work with a team of smart developers. We currently have 5 developers working on the Ajax Control Toolkit (not full-time, they are also building two very cool ASP.NET MVC applications). All the developers who work on our team are required to have strong JavaScript, jQuery, and ASP.NET MVC skills. In the interest of being as transparent as possible about our work on the Ajax Control Toolkit, I plan to blog frequently about our team’s ongoing work. In my next blog entry, I plan to write about the two Ajax Control Toolkit controls which are the focus of our work for next release.

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• SQL SERVER – Developer Training Resources and Summary Roundup

  - by pinaldave

  It is always pleasure for any author when other renowned authors in the industry write about you. Earlier I wrote a five part blog series on Developer Training and I have received a phenomenal response to the series. I have received plenty of comments, questions and feedback. I thought it would be nice to sum up the whole series as well answer a few of the questions received. Quick Recap Developer Training - Importance and Significance - Part 1 In this part we discussed the importance of training in the real world. The most important and valuable resource any company is its employee. Employees who have been well-trained will be better at their jobs and produce a better product.  An employee who is well trained obviously knows more about their job and all the technical aspects. I have a very high opinion about training employees and it is the most important task. Developer Training – Employee Morals and Ethics – Part 2 In this part we discussed the most crucial components of training. Often employees are expecting the company to pay for their training and the company expresses no interest in training the employee. Quite often training expenses are the real issue for both the employee and employer. There are companies that pay for 100% of the expenses and there are employees who opt for training on their own expense during their personal time. Training is often looked at as vacation by employee and employers and we need to change this mind-set. One of the ways is to report back the learning to your manager and implement newly learned knowledge in day-to-day work. Developer Training – Difficult Questions and Alternative Perspective - Part 3 This part was the most difficult to write as I tried to address a few difficult questions and answers. Training is such a sensitive issue that many developers when not receiving chance for training think about leaving the organization. The manager often feels pressure to accommodate every single employee for training even though his training budget is limited. It is indeed the responsibility of the developer to get maximum advantage from the training. Training immediately helps organizations but stays as a part of an employee’s knowledge forever. Developer Training – Various Options for Developer Training – Part 4 In this part I tried to explore a few methods and options for training. The generic feedback I received on this blog post was short and I should have explored each of the subject of the training in details. I believe there are two big buckets of training 1) Instructor Lead Training and 2) Self Lead Training. The common element between both the methods is “learning material”. Learning material can be of any format – videos, books, paper notes or just a plain black board. Instructor-led training is a very effective mode but not possible every single time. During the course of the developer’s career, one has to learn lots of new technology and it is almost impossible to have a quality trainer available on that subject at that time. Books are most effective and proven methods, however, it always helps if someone explains the concepts of the book with a demonstration. In recent times I have started to believe in online trainings which leads to a hybrid experience. Online trainings take the best part of the books and the best part of the instructor-led training and gives effective training in a matter of hours. Developer Training – A Conclusive Summary- Part 5 In this part, I shared what I was continuously thinking about developer training. There is no better teacher than oneself. There is no better motivation than a personal desire to learn new technology. Honestly there is nothing more personal learning. That “change is the only constant” and “adapt & overcome” are the essential lessons of life. One cannot stop the learning and resist the change. In the IT industry “ego of knowing all” and the “resistance to change” are the most challenging issues. Once someone overcomes them, life is much easier. I believe that proper and appropriate high quality training can help to address the burning issues. Opinion of Friends I invited a few of my friends to express their opinion about developer training and here are their opinions. I am listing them here in the order of the blog post publishing date. Nakul Vachhrajani - Developer Trainings-Importance, Benefits, Tips and follow-up Nakul’s sums of many of the concepts which are complementary to my blog posts. Nakul addresses the burning question of developer training with different angles. I am personally very impressed by his following statement - “Being skilled does not mean having just a stack of certifications, but it also means having an understanding about the internals of the products that you are working on – and using that knowledge to improve the efficiency & productivity at the workplace in turn resulting in better products, better consulting abilities and a happier self.” Nakul also suggests the online training options of Pluralsight. Vinod Kumar - Training–a necessity or bonus Vinod Kumar comes up with excellent follow up on developer training. Vinod is known for his inspirational writing about SQL Server. Vinod starts with a story of a student who is extremely eager to learn the wisdom of life from a monk but the monk does not accept him as a disciple for a long time. The conversation between student and monk is indeed an essence of all learning. We all want to learn quickly and be successful but the most important thing in life is to have the right attitude towards learning and more so towards life. The blog post end with a very important thought about how to avoid the famous excuse – “I don’t have enough time.” Ritesh Shah - Training – useful or useless? Ritesh brings up very important concept related to training. Ritesh in his meticulous style explains why training is an important and lifelong process. Training must not stop at any age but should continue forever. The moment training stops, progress stops along with. Paras Doshi - Professional Development Resource Paras is known for his to–the-point writing, and has summarized the five part series very precisely. He read the five part series and created a digest summary of the blog post. If you are in a rush and have no time to read my five series – I suggest you read his blog post. Training Resources I am often asked what the best resources for learning new technology are. This is the most difficult question EVER. There are plenty of good training resources available. When it is about training our needs are different, our preference of learning is different and we all have an opinion. Additionally, we all are located in different geographic locations worldwide and there is no way one solution will fit all. However, let me list a few of the training resources which I have built so far and you can consume them if you find it relevant to your need. SQL Server Books SQL Server Interview Questions and Answers SQL Wait Stats SQL Programming Joes 2 Pros SQL Server Video Tutorials SQL Server Questions and Answers SQL Server Performance: Indexing Basics SQL Server Performance: Introduction to Query Tuning SQL in Sixty Seconds Series of Sixty Seconds Learning Video on YouTube Trust me worldwide web is very big and there are plenty of high quality learning materials available worldwide – trainer-led as well online. I suggest you explore various options and make the best choice for yourself. Remember, training is your personal journey and it should never stop. Are you ready? Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Developer Training, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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