system compromise - Page 416

What Poor Project Management Might Be Costing You

- by Sylvie MacKenzie, PMP

For project-intensive organizations, capital investment decisions define both success and failure. Getting them wrong—the risk of delays and schedule and cost overruns are ever present—introduces the potential for huge financial losses. The resulting consequences can be significant, and directly impact both a company’s profit outlook and its share price performance—which in turn is the fundamental measure of executive performance. This intrinsic link between long-term investment planning and short-term market performance is investigated in the independent report Stock Shock, written by a consultant from Clarity Economics and commissioned by the EPPM Board. A new international steering group organized by Oracle, the EPPM Board brings together senior executives from leading public and private sector organizations to explore the critical role played by enterprise project and portfolio management (EPPM). Stock Shock reviews several high-profile recent project failures, and combined with other research reviews the lessons to be learned. It analyzes how portfolio management is an exercise in balancing risk and reward, a process that places the emphasis firmly on executives to correctly determine which potential investments will deliver the greatest value and contribute most to the bottom line. Conversely, it also details how poor evaluation decisions can quickly impact the overall value of an organization’s project portfolio and compromise long-range capital planning goals. Failure to Deliver—In Search of ROI The report also cites figures from the Economist Intelligence Unit survey that found that more organizations (12 percent) expected to deliver planned ROI less than half the time, than those (11 percent) who claim to deliver it 90 percent or more of the time. This fact is linked to a recent report from Booz & Co. that shows how the average tenure of a global chief executive has fallen from 8.1 years to 6.3 years. “Senior executives need to begin looking at effective project delivery not as a bonus, but as an essential facet of business success,” according to Stock Shock author Phil Thornton. “Consolidated and integrated visibility into individual projects is the most practical solution to overcoming these challenges, which explains the increasing popularity of PPM technologies as an effective oversight and delivery platform.” Stock Shock is available for download on the EPPM microsite at http://www.oracle.com/oms/eppm/us/stock-shock-report-1691569.html

Read the article

Effective versus efficient code

- by Todd Williamson

TL;DR: Quick and dirty code, or "correct" (insert your definition of this term) code? There is often a tension between "efficient" and "effective" in software development. "Efficient" often means code that is "correct" from the point of view of adhering to standards, using widely-accepted patterns/approaches for structures, regardless of project size, budget, etc. "Effective" is not about being "right", but about getting things done. This often results in code that falls outside the bounds of commonly accepted "correct" standards, usage, etc. Usually the people paying for the development effort have dictated ahead of time what it is that they value more. An organization that lives in a technical space will tend towards the efficient end, others will tend towards the effective. Developers often refuse to compromise their favored approach for the other. In my own experience I have found that people with formal education in software development tend towards the Efficient camp. Those that picked up software development more or less as a tool to get things done tend towards the Effective camp. These camps don't get along very well. When managing a team of developers who are not all in one camp it is challenging. In your own experience, which camp do you land in, and do you find yourself having to justify your approach to others? To management? To other developers?

Read the article

Source-control 'wet-work'?

- by Phil Factor

When a design or creative work is flawed beyond remedy, it is often best to destroy it and start again. The other day, I lost the code to a long and intricate SQL batch I was working on. I’d thought it was impossible, but it happened. With all the technology around that is designed to prevent this occurring, this sort of accident has become a rare event. If it weren’t for a deranged laptop, and my distraction, the code wouldn’t have been lost this time. As always, I sighed, had a soothing cup of tea, and typed it all in again. The new code I hastily tapped in was much better: I’d held in my head the essence of how the code should work rather than the details: I now knew for certain the start point, the end, and how it should be achieved. Instantly the detritus of half-baked thoughts fell away and I was able to write logical code that performed better. Because I could work so quickly, I was able to hold the details of all the columns and variables in my head, and the dynamics of the flow of data. It was, in fact, easier and quicker to start from scratch rather than tidy up and refactor the existing code with its inevitable fumbling and half-baked ideas. What a shame that technology is now so good that developers rarely experience the cleansing shock of losing one’s code and having to rewrite it from scratch. If you’ve never accidentally lost your code, then it is worth doing it deliberately once for the experience. Creative people have, until Technology mistakenly prevented it, torn up their drafts or sketches, threw them in the bin, and started again from scratch. Leonardo’s obsessive reworking of the Mona Lisa was renowned because it was so unusual: Most artists have been utterly ruthless in destroying work that didn’t quite make it. Authors are particularly keen on writing afresh, and the results are generally positive. Lawrence of Arabia actually lost the entire 250,000 word manuscript of ‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ by accidentally leaving it on a train at Reading station, before rewriting a much better version. Now, any writer or artist is seduced by technology into altering or refining their work rather than casting it dramatically in the bin or setting a light to it on a bonfire, and rewriting it from the blank page. It is easy to pick away at a flawed work, but the real creative process is far more brutal. Once, many years ago whilst running a software house that supplied commercial software to local businesses, I’d been supervising an accounting system for a farming cooperative. No packaged system met their needs, and it was all hand-cut code. For us, it represented a breakthrough as it was for a government organisation, and success would guarantee more contracts. As you’ve probably guessed, the code got mangled in a disk crash just a week before the deadline for delivery, and the many backups all proved to be entirely corrupted by a faulty tape drive. There were some fragments left on individual machines, but they were all of different versions. The developers were in despair. Strangely, I managed to re-write the bulk of a three-month project in a manic and caffeine-soaked weekend. Sure, that elegant universally-applicable input-form routine was‘nt quite so elegant, but it didn’t really need to be as we knew what forms it needed to support. Yes, the code lacked architectural elegance and reusability. By dawn on Monday, the application passed its integration tests. The developers rose to the occasion after I’d collapsed, and tidied up what I’d done, though they were reproachful that some of the style and elegance had gone out of the application. By the delivery date, we were able to install it. It was a smaller, faster application than the beta they’d seen and the user-interface had a new, rather Spartan, appearance that we swore was done to conform to the latest in user-interface guidelines. (we switched to Helvetica font to look more ‘Bauhaus’ ). The client was so delighted that he forgave the new bugs that had crept in. I still have the disk that crashed, up in the attic. In IT, we have had mixed experiences from complete re-writes. Lotus 123 never really recovered from a complete rewrite from assembler into C, Borland made the mistake with Arago and Quattro Pro and Netscape’s complete rewrite of their Navigator 4 browser was a white-knuckle ride. In all cases, the decision to rewrite was a result of extreme circumstances where no other course of action seemed possible. The rewrite didn’t come out of the blue. I prefer to remember the rewrite of Minix by young Linus Torvalds, or the rewrite of Bitkeeper by a slightly older Linus. The rewrite of CP/M didn’t do too badly either, did it? Come to think of it, the guy who decided to rewrite the windowing system of the Xerox Star never regretted the decision. I’ll agree that one should often resist calls for a rewrite. One of the worst habits of the more inexperienced programmer is to denigrate whatever code he or she inherits, and then call loudly for a complete rewrite. They are buoyed up by the mistaken belief that they can do better. This, however, is a different psychological phenomenon, more related to the idea of some motorcyclists that they are operating on infinite lives, or the occasional squaddies that if they charge the machine-guns determinedly enough all will be well. Grim experience brings out the humility in any experienced programmer. I’m referring to quite different circumstances here. Where a team knows the requirements perfectly, are of one mind on methodology and coding standards, and they already have a solution, then what is wrong with considering a complete rewrite? Rewrites are so painful in the early stages, until that point where one realises the payoff, that even I quail at the thought. One needs a natural disaster to push one over the edge. The trouble is that source-control systems, and disaster recovery systems, are just too good nowadays. If I were to lose this draft of this very blog post, I know I’d rewrite it much better. However, if you read this, you’ll know I didn’t have the nerve to delete it and start again. There was a time that one prayed that unreliable hardware would deliver you from an unmaintainable mess of a codebase, but now technology has made us almost entirely immune to such a merciful act of God. An old friend of mine with long experience in the software industry has long had the idea of the ‘source-control wet-work’, where one hires a malicious hacker in some wild eastern country to hack into one’s own source control system to destroy all trace of the source to an application. Alas, backup systems are just too good to make this any more than a pipedream. Somehow, it would be difficult to promote the idea. As an alternative, could one construct a source control system that, on doing all the code-quality metrics, would systematically destroy all trace of source code that failed the quality test? Alas, I can’t see many managers buying into the idea. In reading the full story of the near-loss of Toy Story 2, it set me thinking. It turned out that the lucky restoration of the code wasn’t the happy ending one first imagined it to be, because they eventually came to the conclusion that the plot was fundamentally flawed and it all had to be rewritten anyway. Was this an early case of the ‘source-control wet-job’?’ It is very hard nowadays to do a rapid U-turn in a development project because we are far too prone to cling to our existing source-code.

Read the article

Python in Finance by Yuxing Yan, Packt Publishing Book Review

- by Compudicted

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Compudicted/archive/2014/06/04/python-in-finance-by-yuxing-yan-packt-publishing-book-review.aspx I picked Python in Finance from Packt Publishing to review expecting to bore myself with complex algorithms and senseless formulas while seeing little actual Python in action, indeed at 400 pages plus it may seem so. But, it turned out to be quite the opposite. I learned a lot about practical implementations of various Python modules as SciPy, NumPy and several more, I think they empower a developer a lot. No wonder Python is on the track to become a de-facto scientist language of choice! But I am not going to compromise the truth, the book does discuss numerous financial terms, many of them, and this is where the enormous power of this book is coming from: it is like standing on the shoulders of a giant. Python is that giant - flexible and powerful, yet very approachable. The TOC is very detailed thanks to Packt, any one can see what financial algorithms are covered, I am only going to name a few which I had most fun with (though all of them are covered in enough details): Fama*, Fat Tail, ARCH, Monte-Carlo and of course the volatility smile! I am under an impression this book is best suited for students in Finance, especially those who are about to join the workforce, but I suspect the material in this book is very well suited for mature Financists, an investor who has some programming skills and wants to benefit from it, or even a programmer, or a mathematician who already knows Python or any other language, but wants to have fun in Quantitative Finance and earn a few buck! Pure fun, real results, tons of practical insight from reading data from a file to downloading trade data from Yahoo! Lastly, I need to complement Yuxing – he is a talented teacher, this book could not be what it is otherwise. It is a 5 out of 5 product. Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book for review purposes from the publisher.

Read the article

Security Alert For CVE-2010-4476 Released

- by eric.maurice

Hello, this is Eric Maurice again. Oracle just released a Security Alert with a fix for the vulnerability CVE-2010-4476, which affects Oracle Java SE and Oracle Java For Business. This vulnerability is present in Java running on servers as well as standalone Java desktop applications. Its successful exploitation by a malicious attacker can result in a complete denial of service for the affected servers. While only recently publicly disclosed, a number of Internet sites have since then reproduced details about this vulnerability, including exploit codes, which may result in allowing a malicious attacker to create a denial of service condition against the targeted system. Oracle therefore strongly recommends that affected organizations apply this fix as soon as possible. Please note that a fix for this vulnerability will also be included in the upcoming Java Critical Patch Update (Java SE and Java for Business Critical Patch Update - February 2011), which will be released on February 15th 2011. Note that the impact of this vulnerability on desktops is minimal: the affected applications or applets running in Internet browsers for example, might stop responding and may need to be restarted; however the desktop itself will not be compromised (i.e. no compromise at the desktop OS level). Oracle therefore recommends that consumers use the Java auto-update mechanism to get this fix. This will prompt them to install the latest version of the Java Runtime Environment 6 update 24 or higher (JRE), which includes the fix for this vulnerability. JRE 6 update 24 will also be distributed with the Java SE and Java for Business Critical Patch Update - February 2011. For More Information: The Critical Patch Updates and Security Alerts page is located at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/security/alerts-086861.html The Advisory for Security Alert CVE-2010-4476 is located at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/security/alert-cve-2010-4476-305811.html More information on Oracle Software Security Assurance is located at http://www.oracle.com/us/support/assurance/index.html Consumers can go to http://www.java.com/en/download/installed.jsp to ensure that they have the latest version of Java running on their desktops. More information on Java Update is available at http://www.java.com/en/download/help/java_update.xml

Read the article

DBA Best Practices - A Blog Series: Episode 1 - Backups

- by Argenis

This blog post is part of the DBA Best Practices series, on which various topics of concern for daily database operations are discussed. Your feedback and comments are very much welcome, so please drop by the comments section and be sure to leave your thoughts on the subject. Morning Coffee When I was a DBA, the first thing I did when I sat down at my desk at work was checking that all backups had completed successfully. It really was more of a ritual, since I had a dual system in place to check for backup completion: 1) the scheduled agent jobs to back up the databases were set to alert the NOC in failure, and 2) I had a script run from a central server every so often to check for any backup failures. Why the redundancy, you might ask. Well, for one I was once bitten by the fact that database mail doesn't work 100% of the time. Potential causes for failure include issues on the SMTP box that relays your server email, firewall problems, DNS issues, etc. And so to be sure that my backups completed fine, I needed to rely on a mechanism other than having the servers do the taking - I needed to interrogate the servers and ask each one if an issue had occurred. This is why I had a script run every so often. Some of you might have monitoring tools in place like Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) or similar 3rd party products that would track all these things for you. But at that moment, we had no resort but to write our own Powershell scripts to do it. Now it goes without saying that if you don't have backups in place, you might as well find another career. Your most sacred job as a DBA is to protect the data from a disaster, and only properly safeguarded backups can offer you peace of mind here. "But, we have a cluster...we don't need backups" Sadly I've heard this line more than I would have liked to. You need to understand that a cluster is comprised of shared storage, and that is precisely your single point of failure. A cluster will protect you from an issue at the Operating System level, and also under an outage of any SQL-related service or dependent devices. But it will most definitely NOT protect you against corruption, nor will it protect you against somebody deleting data from a table - accidentally or otherwise. Backup, fine. How often do I take a backup? The answer to this is something you will hear frequently when working with databases: it depends. What does it depend on? For one, you need to understand how much data your business is willing to lose. This is what's called Recovery Point Objective, or RPO. If you don't know how much data your business is willing to lose, you need to have an honest and realistic conversation about data loss expectations with your customers, internal or external. From my experience, their first answer to the question "how much data loss can you withstand?" will be "zero". In that case, you will need to explain how zero data loss is very difficult and very costly to achieve, even in today's computing environments. Do you want to go ahead and take full backups of all your databases every hour, or even every day? Probably not, because of the impact that taking a full backup can have on a system. That's what differential and transaction log backups are for. Have I answered the question of how often to take a backup? No, and I did that on purpose. You need to think about how much time you have to recover from any event that requires you to restore your databases. This is what's called Recovery Time Objective. Again, if you go ask your customer how long of an outage they can withstand, at first you will get a completely unrealistic number - and that will be your starting point for discussing a solution that is cost effective. The point that I'm trying to get across is that you need to have a plan. This plan needs to be practiced, and tested. Like a football playbook, you need to rehearse the moves you'll perform when the time comes. How often is up to you, and the objective is that you feel better about yourself and the steps you need to follow when emergency strikes. A backup is nothing more than an untested restore Backups are files. Files are prone to corruption. Put those two together and realize how you feel about those backups sitting on that network drive. When was the last time you restored any of those? Restoring your backups on another box - that, by the way, doesn't have to match the specs of your production server - will give you two things: 1) peace of mind, because now you know that your backups are good and 2) a place to offload your consistency checks with DBCC CHECKDB or any of the other DBCC commands like CHECKTABLE or CHECKCATALOG. This is a great strategy for VLDBs that cannot withstand the additional load created by the consistency checks. If you choose to offload your consistency checks to another server though, be sure to run DBCC CHECKDB WITH PHYSICALONLY on the production server, and if you're using SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 CU4 and above, be sure to enable traceflags 2562 and/or 2549, which will speed up the PHYSICALONLY checks further - you can read more about this enhancement here. Back to the "How Often" question for a second. If you have the disk, and the network latency, and the system resources to do so, why not backup the transaction log often? As in, every 5 minutes, or even less than that? There's not much downside to doing it, as you will have to clear the log with a backup sooner than later, lest you risk running out space on your tlog, or even your drive. The one drawback to this approach is that you will have more files to deal with at restore time, and processing each file will add a bit of extra time to the entire process. But it might be worth that time knowing that you minimized the amount of data lost. Again, test your plan to make sure that it matches your particular needs. Where to back up to? Network share? Locally? SAN volume? This is another topic where everybody has a favorite choice. So, I'll stick to mentioning what I like to do and what I consider to be the best practice in this regard. I like to backup to a SAN volume, i.e., a drive that actually lives in the SAN, and can be easily attached to another server in a pinch, saving you valuable time - you wouldn't need to restore files on the network (slow) or pull out drives out a dead server (been there, done that, it’s also slow!). The key is to have a copy of those backup files made quickly, and, if at all possible, to a remote target on a different datacenter - or even the cloud. There are plenty of solutions out there that can help you put such a solution together. That right there is the first step towards a practical Disaster Recovery plan. But there's much more to DR, and that's material for a different blog post in this series.

Read the article

Master-slave vs. peer-to-peer archictecture: benefits and problems

- by Ashok_Ora

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE Almost two decades ago, I was a member of a database development team that introduced adaptive locking. Locking, the most popular concurrency control technique in database systems, is pessimistic. Locking ensures that two or more conflicting operations on the same data item don’t “trample” on each other’s toes, resulting in data corruption. In a nutshell, here’s the issue we were trying to address. In everyday life, traffic lights serve the same purpose. They ensure that traffic flows smoothly and when everyone follows the rules, there are no accidents at intersections. As I mentioned earlier, the problem with typical locking protocols is that they are pessimistic. Regardless of whether there is another conflicting operation in the system or not, you have to hold a lock! Acquiring and releasing locks can be quite expensive, depending on how many objects the transaction touches. Every transaction has to pay this penalty. To use the earlier traffic light analogy, if you have ever waited at a red light in the middle of nowhere with no one on the road, wondering why you need to wait when there’s clearly no danger of a collision, you know what I mean. The adaptive locking scheme that we invented was able to minimize the number of locks that a transaction held, by detecting whether there were one or more transactions that needed conflicting eyou could get by without holding any lock at all. In many “well-behaved” workloads, there are few conflicts, so this optimization is a huge win. If, on the other hand, there are many concurrent, conflicting requests, the algorithm gracefully degrades to the “normal” behavior with minimal cost. We were able to reduce the number of lock requests per TPC-B transaction from 178 requests down to 2! Wow! This is a dramatic improvement in concurrency as well as transaction latency. The lesson from this exercise was that if you can identify the common scenario and optimize for that case so that only the uncommon scenarios are more expensive, you can make dramatic improvements in performance without sacrificing correctness. So how does this relate to the architecture and design of some of the modern NoSQL systems? NoSQL systems can be broadly classified as master-slave sharded, or peer-to-peer sharded systems. NoSQL systems with a peer-to-peer architecture have an interesting way of handling changes. Whenever an item is changed, the client (or an intermediary) propagates the changes synchronously or asynchronously to multiple copies (for availability) of the data. Since the change can be propagated asynchronously, during some interval in time, it will be the case that some copies have received the update, and others haven’t. What happens if someone tries to read the item during this interval? The client in a peer-to-peer system will fetch the same item from multiple copies and compare them to each other. If they’re all the same, then every copy that was queried has the same (and up-to-date) value of the data item, so all’s good. If not, then the system provides a mechanism to reconcile the discrepancy and to update stale copies. So what’s the problem with this? There are two major issues: First, IT’S HORRIBLY PESSIMISTIC because, in the common case, it is unlikely that the same data item will be updated and read from different locations at around the same time! For every read operation, you have to read from multiple copies. That’s a pretty expensive, especially if the data are stored in multiple geographically separate locations and network latencies are high. Second, if the copies are not all the same, the application has to reconcile the differences and propagate the correct value to the out-dated copies. This means that the application program has to handle discrepancies in the different versions of the data item and resolve the issue (which can further add to cost and operation latency). Resolving discrepancies is only one part of the problem. What if the same data item was updated independently on two different nodes (copies)? In that case, due to the asynchronous nature of change propagation, you might land up with different versions of the data item in different copies. In this case, the application program also has to resolve conflicts and then propagate the correct value to the copies that are out-dated or have incorrect versions. This can get really complicated. My hunch is that there are many peer-to-peer-based applications that don’t handle this correctly, and worse, don’t even know it. Imagine have 100s of millions of records in your database – how can you tell whether a particular data item is incorrect or out of date? And what price are you willing to pay for ensuring that the data can be trusted? Multiple network messages per read request? Discrepancy and conflict resolution logic in the application, and potentially, additional messages? All this overhead, when all you were trying to do was to read a data item. Wouldn’t it be simpler to avoid this problem in the first place? Master-slave architectures like the Oracle NoSQL Database handles this very elegantly. A change to a data item is always sent to the master copy. Consequently, the master copy always has the most current and authoritative version of the data item. The master is also responsible for propagating the change to the other copies (for availability and read scalability). Client drivers are aware of master copies and replicas, and client drivers are also aware of the “currency” of a replica. In other words, each NoSQL Database client knows how stale a replica is. This vastly simplifies the job of the application developer. If the application needs the most current version of the data item, the client driver will automatically route the request to the master copy. If the application is willing to tolerate some staleness of data (e.g. a version that is no more than 1 second out of date), the client can easily determine which replica (or set of replicas) can satisfy the request, and route the request to the most efficient copy. This results in a dramatic simplification in application logic and also minimizes network requests (the driver will only send the request to exactl the right replica, not many). So, back to my original point. A well designed and well architected system minimizes or eliminates unnecessary overhead and avoids pessimistic algorithms wherever possible in order to deliver a highly efficient and high performance system. If you’ve every programmed an Oracle NoSQL Database application, you’ll know the difference! /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}

Read the article

Windows Azure Virtual Machine Readiness and Capacity Assessment for SQL Server

- by SQLOS Team

Windows Azure Virtual Machine Readiness and Capacity Assessment for Windows Server Machine Running SQL Server With the release of MAP Toolkit 8.0 Beta, we have added a new scenario to assess your Windows Azure Virtual Machine Readiness. The MAP 8.0 Beta performs a comprehensive assessment of Windows Servers running SQL Server to determine you level of readiness to migrate an on-premise physical or virtual machine to Windows Azure Virtual Machines. The MAP Toolkit then offers suggested changes to prepare the machines for migration, such as upgrading the operating system or SQL Server. MAP Toolkit 8.0 Beta is available for download here Your participation and feedback is very important to make the MAP Toolkit work better for you. We encourage you to participate in the beta program and provide your feedback at [email protected] or through one of our surveys. Now, let’s walk through the MAP Toolkit task for completing the Windows Azure Virtual Machine assessment and capacity planning. The tasks include the following: Perform an inventory View the Windows Azure VM Readiness results and report Collect performance data for determine VM sizing View the Windows Azure Capacity results and report Perform an inventory: 1. To perform an inventory against a single machine or across a complete environment, choose Perform an Inventory to launch the Inventory and Assessment Wizard as shown below: 2. After the Inventory and Assessment Wizard launches, select either the Windows computers or SQL Server scenario to inventory Windows machines. HINT: If you don’t care about completely inventorying a machine, just select the SQL Server scenario. Click Next to Continue. 3. On the Discovery Methods page, select how you want to discover computers and then click Next to continue. Description of Discovery Methods: Use Active Directory Domain Services -- This method allows you to query a domain controller via the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) and select computers in all or specific domains, containers, or OUs. Use this method if all computers and devices are in AD DS. Windows networking protocols -- This method uses the WIN32 LAN Manager application programming interfaces to query the Computer Browser service for computers in workgroups and Windows NT 4.0–based domains. If the computers on the network are not joined to an Active Directory domain, use only the Windows networking protocols option to find computers. System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) -- This method enables you to inventory computers managed by System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM). You need to provide credentials to the System Center Configuration Manager server in order to inventory the managed computers. When you select this option, the MAP Toolkit will query SCCM for a list of computers and then MAP will connect to these computers. Scan an IP address range -- This method allows you to specify the starting address and ending address of an IP address range. The wizard will then scan all IP addresses in the range and inventory only those computers. Note: This option can perform poorly, if many IP addresses aren’t being used within the range. Manually enter computer names and credentials -- Use this method if you want to inventory a small number of specific computers. Import computer names from a files -- Using this method, you can create a text file with a list of computer names that will be inventoried. 4. On the All Computers Credentials page, enter the accounts that have administrator rights to connect to the discovered machines. This does not need to a domain account, but needs to be a local administrator. I have entered my domain account that is an administrator on my local machine. Click Next after one or more accounts have been added. NOTE: The MAP Toolkit primarily uses Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) to collect hardware, device, and software information from the remote computers. In order for the MAP Toolkit to successfully connect and inventory computers in your environment, you have to configure your machines to inventory through WMI and also allow your firewall to enable remote access through WMI. The MAP Toolkit also requires remote registry access for certain assessments. In addition to enabling WMI, you need accounts with administrative privileges to access desktops and servers in your environment. 5. On the Credentials Order page, select the order in which want the MAP Toolkit to connect to the machine and SQL Server. Generally just accept the defaults and click Next. 6. On the Enter Computers Manually page, click Create to pull up at dialog to enter one or more computer names. 7. On the Summary page confirm your settings and then click Finish. After clicking Finish the inventory process will start, as shown below: Windows Azure Readiness results and report After the inventory progress has completed, you can review the results under the Database scenario. On the tile, you will see the number of Windows Server machine with SQL Server that were analyzed, the number of machines that are ready to move without changes and the number of machines that require further changes. If you click this Azure VM Readiness tile, you will see additional details and can generate the Windows Azure VM Readiness Report. After the report is generated, select View | Saved Reports and Proposals to view the location of the report. Open up WindowsAzureVMReadiness* report in Excel. On the Windows tab, you can see the results of the assessment. This report has a column for the Operating System and SQL Server assessment and provides a recommendation on how to resolve, if there a component is not supported. Collect Performance Data Launch the Performance Wizard to collect performance information for the Windows Server machines that you would like the MAP Toolkit to suggest a Windows Azure VM size for. Windows Azure Capacity results and report After the performance metrics are collected, the Azure VM Capacity title will display the number of Virtual Machine sizes that are suggested for the Windows Server and Linux machines that were analyzed. You can then click on the Azure VM Capacity tile to see the capacity details and generate the Windows Azure VM Capacity Report. Within this report, you can view the performance data that was collected and the Virtual Machine sizes. MAP Toolkit 8.0 Beta is available for download here Your participation and feedback is very important to make the MAP Toolkit work better for you. We encourage you to participate in the beta program and provide your feedback at [email protected] or through one of our surveys. Useful References: Windows Azure Homepage How to guides for Windows Azure Virtual Machines Provisioning a SQL Server Virtual Machine on Windows Azure Windows Azure Pricing Peter Saddow Senior Program Manager – MAP Toolkit Team

Read the article

How to motivate visitors to comment

- by Michal

At first I must apologize, because I am not sure if this question is valid for webmasters topic. I deal with the problem as being webmaster, however, i think this question is more related with marketing. Nevertheless, I was searching for marketing stack-overflow at meta stack-overflow and did not find such page. Background Four days ago, I launched a portal with database of barber salons at which people can find a salon through various criterions, see its photos, details, and also put a comment with their own opinion. The development took me half a year and it took me other 2 months to fill the database with information about barbers (I've also hired another three people to this job). I have not a big problem with getting people to my portal, I pay for PPC, comment on barber discussions etc.. In past four days I've reached a satisfactory number of visitors. Problem I deal with fact that everyone wants to search and read comments, but no one is willing to put her/his own opinion to barber. So I've tried following (2 days ago): Made comment anonymous, no one has to be afraid of compromise her/his identity with a salon owner I prepared a competition for users in which they can win a cosmetic package if they comment on at least three different salons I payed for PPC campaign on facebook which is telling people about the competition I registered competition on 20 portals for competitions And the result: People are commenting on facebook that the competition is a good idea They are giving likes on facebook But no one put a single comment to a barber salon I am getting little confused about what am I doing wrong. I will be thankful for any advice.

Read the article

Energy Firms Targetted for Sensitive Documents

- by martin.abrahams

Numerous multinational energy companies have been targeted by hackers who have been focusing on financial documents related to oil and gas field exploration, bidding contracts, and drilling rights, as well as proprietary industrial process documents, according to a new McAfee report. "It ... speaks to quite a sad state of our critical infrastructure security. These were not sophisticated attacks ... yet they were very successful in achieving their goals," said Dmitri Alperovitch, McAfee's vice president for threat research. Apparently, the attacks can be traced back over several years, creating a sustained security compromise that has provided access to highly sensitive information that is of huge financial value to competitors. The value of IRM as an additional layer of protection is clear. Whether your infrastructure security is in a sad state or is state of the art, breaches are always a possibility - and in any case, a lot of sensitive information is shared with third parties whose infrastructure security might not be as good as yours. IRM protects the individual information assets directly so that, even if infrastructure security is compromised, your critical information is enrypted and trackable and only accessible to authenticated, authorised, audited users. The full McAfee report is available here.

Read the article

DBA Best Practices - A Blog Series: Episode 1 - Backups

- by Argenis

This blog post is part of the DBA Best Practices series, on which various topics of concern for daily database operations are discussed. Your feedback and comments are very much welcome, so please drop by the comments section and be sure to leave your thoughts on the subject. Morning Coffee When I was a DBA, the first thing I did when I sat down at my desk at work was checking that all backups have completed successfully. It really was more of a ritual, since I had a dual system in place to check for backup completion: 1) the scheduled agent jobs to back up the databases were set to alert the NOC in failure, and 2) I had a script run from a central server every so often to check for any backup failures. Why the redundancy, you might ask. Well, for one I was once bitten by the fact that database mail doesn't work 100% of the time. Potential causes for failure include issues on the SMTP box that relays your server email, firewall problems, DNS issues, etc. And so to be sure that my backups completed fine, I needed to rely on a mechanism other than having the servers do the taking - I needed to interrogate the servers and ask each one if an issue had occurred. This is why I had a script run every so often. Some of you might have monitoring tools in place like Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) or similar 3rd party products that would track all these things for you. But at that moment, we had no resort but to write our own Powershell scripts to do it. Now it goes without saying that if you don't have backups in place, you might as well find another career. Your most sacred job as a DBA is to protect the data from a disaster, and only properly safeguarded backups can offer you peace of mind here. "But, we have a cluster...we don't need backups" Sadly I've heard this line more than I would have liked to. You need to understand that a cluster is comprised of shared storage, and that is precisely your single point of failure. A cluster will protect you from an issue at the Operating System level, and also under an outage of any SQL-related service or dependent devices. But it will most definitely NOT protect you against corruption, nor will it protect you against somebody deleting data from a table - accidentally or otherwise. Backup, fine. How often do I take a backup? The answer to this is something you will hear frequently when working with databases: it depends. What does it depend on? For one, you need to understand how much data your business is willing to lose. This is what's called Recovery Point Objective, or RPO. If you don't know how much data your business is willing to lose, you need to have an honest and realistic conversation about data loss expectations with your customers, internal or external. From my experience, their first answer to the question "how much data loss can you withstand?" will be "zero". In that case, you will need to explain how zero data loss is very difficult and very costly to achieve, even in today's computing environments. Do you want to go ahead and take full backups of all your databases every hour, or even every day? Probably not, because of the impact that taking a full backup can have on a system. That's what differential and transaction log backups are for. Have I answered the question of how often to take a backup? No, and I did that on purpose. You need to think about how much time you have to recover from any event that requires you to restore your databases. This is what's called Recovery Time Objective. Again, if you go ask your customer how long of an outage they can withstand, at first you will get a completely unrealistic number - and that will be your starting point for discussing a solution that is cost effective. The point that I'm trying to get across is that you need to have a plan. This plan needs to be practiced, and tested. Like a football playbook, you need to rehearse the moves you'll perform when the time comes. How often is up to you, and the objective is that you feel better about yourself and the steps you need to follow when emergency strikes. A backup is nothing more than an untested restore Backups are files. Files are prone to corruption. Put those two together and realize how you feel about those backups sitting on that network drive. When was the last time you restored any of those? Restoring your backups on another box - that, by the way, doesn't have to match the specs of your production server - will give you two things: 1) peace of mind, because now you know that your backups are good and 2) a place to offload your consistency checks with DBCC CHECKDB or any of the other DBCC commands like CHECKTABLE or CHECKCATALOG. This is a great strategy for VLDBs that cannot withstand the additional load created by the consistency checks. If you choose to offload your consistency checks to another server though, be sure to run DBCC CHECKDB WITH PHYSICALONLY on the production server, and if you're using SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 CU4 and above, be sure to enable traceflags 2562 and/or 2549, which will speed up the PHYSICALONLY checks further - you can read more about this enhancement here. Back to the "How Often" question for a second. If you have the disk, and the network latency, and the system resources to do so, why not backup the transaction log often? As in, every 5 minutes, or even less than that? There's not much downside to doing it, as you will have to clear the log with a backup sooner than later, lest you risk running out space on your tlog, or even your drive. The one drawback to this approach is that you will have more files to deal with at restore time, and processing each file will add a bit of extra time to the entire process. But it might be worth that time knowing that you minimized the amount of data lost. Again, test your plan to make sure that it matches your particular needs. Where to back up to? Network share? Locally? SAN volume? This is another topic where everybody has a favorite choice. So, I'll stick to mentioning what I like to do and what I consider to be the best practice in this regard. I like to backup to a SAN volume, i.e., a drive that actually lives in the SAN, and can be easily attached to another server in a pinch, saving you valuable time - you wouldn't need to restore files on the network (slow) or pull out drives out a dead server (been there, done that, it’s also slow!). The key is to have a copy of those backup files made quickly, and, if at all possible, to a remote target on a different datacenter - or even the cloud. There are plenty of solutions out there that can help you put such a solution together. That right there is the first step towards a practical Disaster Recovery plan. But there's much more to DR, and that's material for a different blog post in this series.

Read the article

MVC Razor Engine For Beginners Part 1

- by Humprey Cogay, C|EH, E|CSA

I. What is MVC? a. http://www.asp.net/mvc/tutorials/older-versions/overview/asp-net-mvc-overview II. Software Requirements for this tutorial a. Visual Studio 2010/2012. You can get your free copy here Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 b. MVC Framework Option 1 - Install using a standalone installer http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30683 Option 2 - Install using Web Platform Installer http://www.microsoft.com/web/handlers/webpi.ashx?command=getinstallerredirect&appid=MVC4VS2010_Loc III. Creating your first MVC4 Application a. On the Visual Studio click file new solution link b. Click Other Project Type>Visual Studio Solutions and on the templates window select blank solution and let us name our solution MVCPrimer. c. Now Click File>New and select Project d. Select Visual C#>Web> and select ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Application and Enter MyWebSite as Name e. Select Empty, Razor as view engine and uncheck Create a Unit test project f. You can now view a basic MVC 4 Application Structure on your solution explorer g. Now we will add our first controller by right clicking on the controllers folder on your solution explorer and select Add>Controller h. Change the name of the controller to HomeController and under the scaffolding options select Empty MVC Controller. i. You will now see a basic controller with an Index method that returns an ActionResult j. We will now add a new View Folder for our Home Controller. Right click on the views folder on your solution explorer and select Add> New Folder> and name this folder Home k. Add a new View by right clicking on Views>Home Folder and select Add View. l. Name the view Index, and select Razor(CSHTML) as View Engine, All checkbox should be unchecked for now and click add. m. Relationship between our HomeController and Home Views Sub Folder n. Add new HTML Contents to our newly created Index View o. Press F5 to run our MVC Application p. We will create our new model, Right click on the models folder of our solution explorer and select Add> Class. q. Let us name our class Customer r. Edit the Customer class with the following code s. Open the HomeController by double clickin HomeController of our Controllers folder and edit the HomeControllerusing System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Web; using System.Web.Mvc; namespace MyWebSite.Controllers { public class HomeController : Controller { // // GET: /Home/ public ActionResult Index() { return View(); } public ActionResult ListCustomers() { List<Models.Customer> customers = new List<Models.Customer>(); //Add First Customer to Our Collection customers.Add(new Models.Customer() { Id = 1, CompanyName = "Volvo", ContactNo = "123-0123-0001", ContactPerson = "Gustav Larson", Description = "Volvo Car Corporation, or Volvo Personvagnar AB, is a Scandinavian automobile manufacturer founded in 1927" }); //Add Second Customer to Our Collection customers.Add(new Models.Customer() { Id = 2, CompanyName = "BMW", ContactNo = "999-9876-9898", ContactPerson = "Franz Josef Popp", Description = "Bayerische Motoren Werke AG, (BMW; English: Bavarian Motor Works) is a " + "German automobile, motorcycle and engine manufacturing company founded in 1917. " }); //Add Third Customer to Our Collection customers.Add(new Models.Customer() { Id = 3, CompanyName = "Audi", ContactNo = "983-2222-1212", ContactPerson = "Karl Benz", Description = " is a multinational division of the German manufacturer Daimler AG," }); return View(customers); } } } t. Let us now create a view for this Class, But before continuing Press Ctrl + Shift + B to rebuild the solution, this will make the previously created model on the Model class drop down of the Add View Menu. Right click on the views>Home folder and select Add>View u. Let us name our View as ListCustomers, Select Razor(CSHTML) as View Engine, Put a check mark on Create a strongly-typed view, and select Customer (MyWebSite.Models) as model class. Slect List on the Scaffold Template and Click OK. v. Run the MVC Application by pressing F5, and on the address bar insert Home/ListCustomers, We should now see a web page similar below. x. You can edit ListCustomers.CSHTML to remove and add HTML codes @model IEnumerable<MyWebSite.Models.Customer> @{ Layout = null; } <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width" /> <title>ListCustomers</title> </head> <body> <h2>List of Customers</h2> <table border="1"> <tr> <th> @Html.DisplayNameFor(model => model.CompanyName) </th> <th> @Html.DisplayNameFor(model => model.Description) </th> <th> @Html.DisplayNameFor(model => model.ContactPerson) </th> <th> @Html.DisplayNameFor(model => model.ContactNo) </th> </tr> @foreach (var item in Model) { <tr> <td> @Html.DisplayFor(modelItem => item.CompanyName) </td> <td> @Html.DisplayFor(modelItem => item.Description) </td> <td> @Html.DisplayFor(modelItem => item.ContactPerson) </td> <td> @Html.DisplayFor(modelItem => item.ContactNo) </td> </tr> } </table> </body> </html> y. Press F5 to run the MVC Application z. You will notice some @HTML.DisplayFor codes. These are called HTML Helpers you can read more about HTML Helpers on this site http://www.w3schools.com/aspnet/mvc_htmlhelpers.asp That’s all. You now have your first MVC4 Razor Engine Web Application . . .

Read the article

Problems with Intel Video Resolution on Acer Laptop Wide Display

- by ricstr

I have an ACER Aspire 5332 laptop which I have just installed Ubuntu 12.04 x64, which is causing some issues with the video display on boot and video resolution. First and foremost, it will only boot past the purple screen if GRUB has been edited to replace 'quick splash' with 'nomodeset'. Secondly, once it has booted with the the 'nomodeset' option, it does not allow me to change the resolution higher or lower from 1024 x 786. Is it OK to use the 'nomodeset' for normal use? Will this compromise performance of other devices? The video card is an on-board one, integrated within the Intel GL40 chip-set. The display is a wide-screen LCD, and under Windows could operate under various resolutions. Ideally I would like it to operate on a resolution to fit the wide-screen display as it a bit stretched out at the moment, and less desktop space as I am used to. I believe the optimal resolution is 1366 x 768. Below is some information from the terminal which may be useful. ricstr@Aspire-5332:~$ lspci | grep -i VGA 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 09) ricstr@Aspire-5332:~$ xrandr xrandr: Failed to get size of gamma for output default Screen 0: minimum 1024 x 768, current 1024 x 768, maximum 1024 x 768 default connected 1024x768+0+0 0mm x 0mm 1024x768 0.0*

Read the article

Purpose oriented user accounts on a single desktop?

- by dd_dent

Starting point: I currently do development for Dynamics Ax, Android and an occasional dabble with Wordpress and Python. Soon, I'll start a project involving setting up WP on Google Apps Engine. Everything is, and should continue to, run from the same PC (running Linux Mint). Issue: I'm afraid of botching/bogging down my setup due to tinkering/installing multiple runtimes/IDE's/SDK's/Services, so I was thinking of using multiple users, each purposed to handle the task at hand (web, Android etc) and making each user as inert as possible to one another. What I need to know is the following: Is this a good/feasible practice? The second closest thing to this using remote desktops connections, either to computers or to VM's, which I'd rather avoid. What about switching users? Can it be made seamless? Anything else I should know? Update and clarification regarding VM's and whatnot: The reason I wish to avoid resorting to VM's is that I dislike the performance impact and sluggishness associated with it. I also suspect it might add a layer of complexity I wish to avoid. This answer by Wyatt is interesting but I think it's only partly suited for requirements (web development for example). Also, in reference to the point made about system wide installs, there is a level compromise I should accept as experessed by this for example. This option suggested by 9000 is also enticing (more than VM's actually) and by no means do I intend to "Juggle" JVMs and whatnot, partly due to the reason mentioned before. Regarding complexity, I agree and would consider what was said, only from my experience I tend to pollute my work environment with SDKs and runtimes I tried and discarded, which would occasionally leave leftovers which cause issues throught the session. What I really want is a set of well defined, non virtualized sessions from which I can choose at my leisure and be mostly (to a reasonable extent) safe from affecting each session from the other. And what I'm really asking is if and how can this be done using user accounts.

Read the article

Refactoring an ERB Template to Haml

- by Liam McLennan

ERB is the default view templating system used by Ruby on Rails. Haml is an alternative templating system that uses whitespace to represent document structure. The example from the haml website shows the following equivalent markup: Haml ERB #profile .left.column #date= print_date #address= current_user.address .right.column #email= current_user.email #bio= current_user.bio <div id="profile"> <div class="left column"> <div id="date"><%= print_date %></div> <div id="address"><%= current_user.address %></div> </div> <div class="right column"> <div id="email"><%= current_user.email %></div> <div id="bio"><%= current_user.bio %></div> </div> </div> I like haml because it is concise and the significant whitespace makes it easy to see the structure at a glance. This post is about a ruby project but nhaml makes haml available for asp.net MVC also. The ERB Template Today I spent some time refactoring an ERB template to Haml. The template is called list.html.erb and its purpose is to render a list of tweets (twitter messages). <style> form { float: left; } </style> <h1>Tweets</h1> <table> <thead><tr><th></th><th>System</th><th>Human</th><th></th></tr></thead> <% @tweets.each do |tweet| %> <tr> <td><%= h(tweet['text']) %></td> <td><%= h(tweet['system_classification']) %></td> <td><%= h(tweet['human_classification']) %></td> <td><form action="/tweet/rate" method="post"> <%= token_tag %> <input type="submit" value="Positive"/> <input type="hidden" value="<%= tweet['id']%>" name="id" /> <input type="hidden" value="positive" name="rating" /> </form> <form action="/tweet/rate" method="post"> <%= token_tag %> <input type="submit" value="Neutral"/> <input type="hidden" value="<%= tweet['id']%>" name="id" /> <input type="hidden" value="neutral" name="rating" /> </form> <form action="/tweet/rate" method="post"> <%= token_tag %> <input type="submit" value="Negative"/> <input type="hidden" value="<%= tweet['id']%>" name="id" /> <input type="hidden" value="negative" name="rating" /> </form> </td> </tr> <% end %> </table> Haml Template: Take 1 My first step was to convert this page to a Haml template in place. Directly translating the ERB template to Haml resulted in: list.haml %style form {float: left;} %h1 Tweets %table %thead %tr %th %th System %th Human %th %tbody - @tweets.each do |tweet| %tr %td= tweet['text'] %td= tweet['system_classification'] %td= tweet['human_classification'] %td %form{ :action=>"/tweet/rate", :method=>"post"} = token_tag <input type="submit" value="Positive"/> <input type="hidden" value="positive" name="rating" /> %input{ :type=>"hidden", :value => tweet['id']} %form{ :action=>"/tweet/rate", :method=>"post"} = token_tag <input type="submit" value="Neutral"/> <input type="hidden" value="neutral" name="rating" /> %input{ :type=>"hidden", :value => tweet['id']} %form{ :action=>"/tweet/rate", :method=>"post"} = token_tag <input type="submit" value="Negative"/> <input type="hidden" value="negative" name="rating" /> %input{ :type=>"hidden", :value => tweet['id']} end I like this better already but I can go further. Haml Template: Take 2 The haml documentation says to avoid using iterators so I introduced a partial template (_tweet.haml) as the template to render a single tweet. _tweet.haml %tr %td= tweet['text'] %td= tweet['system_classification'] %td= tweet['human_classification'] %td %form{ :action=>"/tweet/rate", :method=>"post"} = token_tag <input type="submit" value="Positive"/> <input type="hidden" value="positive" name="rating" /> %input{ :type=>"hidden", :value => tweet['id']} %form{ :action=>"/tweet/rate", :method=>"post"} = token_tag <input type="submit" value="Neutral"/> <input type="hidden" value="neutral" name="rating" /> %input{ :type=>"hidden", :value => tweet['id']} %form{ :action=>"/tweet/rate", :method=>"post"} = token_tag <input type="submit" value="Negative"/> <input type="hidden" value="negative" name="rating" /> %input{ :type=>"hidden", :value => tweet['id']} and the list template is simplified to: list.haml %style form {float: left;} %h1 Tweets %table %thead %tr %th %th System %th Human %th %tbody = render(:partial => "tweet", :collection => @tweets) That is definitely an improvement, but then I noticed that _tweet.haml contains three form tags that are nearly identical. Haml Template: Take 3 My first attempt, later aborted, was to use a helper to remove the duplication. A much better solution is to use another partial. _rate_button.haml %form{ :action=>"/tweet/rate", :method=>"post"} = token_tag %input{ :type => "submit", :value => rate_button[:rating].capitalize } %input{ :type => "hidden", :value => rate_button[:rating], :name => 'rating' } %input{ :type => "hidden", :value => rate_button[:id], :name => 'id' } and the tweet template is now simpler: _tweet.haml %tr %td= tweet['text'] %td= tweet['system_classification'] %td= tweet['human_classification'] %td = render( :partial => 'rate_button', :object => {:rating=>'positive', :id=> tweet['id']}) = render( :partial => 'rate_button', :object => {:rating=>'neutral', :id=> tweet['id']}) = render( :partial => 'rate_button', :object => {:rating=>'negative', :id=> tweet['id']}) list.haml remains unchanged. Summary I am extremely happy with the switch. No doubt there are further improvements that I can make, but I feel like what I have now is clean and well factored.

Read the article

Static DataTable or DataSet in a class - bad idea?

- by Superbest

I have several instances of a class. Each instance stores data in a common database. So, I thought "I'll make the DataTable table field static, that way every instance can just add/modify rows to its own table field, but all the data will actually be in one place!" However, apparently it's a bad idea to do use static fields, especially if it's databases: Don't Use "Static" in C#? Is this a bad idea? Will I run into problems later on if I use it? This is a small project so I can accept no testing as a compromise if that is the only drawback. The benefit of using a static database is that there can be many objects of type MyClass, but only one table they all talk to, so a static field seems to be an implementation of exactly this, while keeping syntax concise. I don't see why I shouldn't use a static field (although I wouldn't really know) but if I had to, the best alternative I can think of is creating one DataTable, and passing a reference to it when creating each instance of MyClass, perhaps as a constructor parameter. But is this really an improvement? It seems less intuitive than a static field.

Read the article

Which pattern is best for large project

- by shamim

I have several years of software development experience, but I am not a keen and adroit programmer, to perform better I need helping hands. Recently I engaged in an ERP project. For this project want a very effective structure, which will be easily maintainable and have no compromise about performance issue. Below structures are now present in my old projects. Entity Layer BusinessLogic Layer. DataLogic Layer UI Layer. Bellow picture describe how they are internally connected. For my new project want to change my project structure, I want to follow below steps: Core Layer(common) BLL DAL Model UI Bellow picture describe how they are internally connected. Though goggling some initial type question’s are obscure to me, they are : For new project want to use Entity framework, is it a good idea? Will it increase my project performance? Will it more maintainable than previous structure? Entity Framework core disadvantages/benefits are? For my project need help to select best structure. Will my new structure be better than the old one?

Read the article

Quick and Good: ( Requirement -> Validation -> Design ) for self use?

- by Yugal Jindle

How to casually do the required Software Engineering and designing? I am an inexperienced developer and face the following problem: My company is a start up and has no fix Software engineering systems. I am assigned tasks with not very clear and conflicting requirements. I don't have to follow any designs or verify requirements officially. Problem: I code all day and finally get stuck where requirement conflicts and I have to start over again. I can-not spend a lot of time doing proper SRS or SDD. How should I: List out Requirements for myself. (Not an official document) How to verify and validate the requirements? How to visualize them? How to design them with minimum effort? (As its going to be with me only) I don't want to waste my time coding something that's gonna collapse according to requirement conflict or something! I don't want to compromise with quality but don't want to re-write everything on some change that I didn't expected. I imagine making a diagram for my thought process that will show me conflict in the diagram itself, then finally correcting the diagram - I decide my design and structure my code in terms of interfaces or something. And then finally start implementing my design. I am able to sense the lack of systematic approach, but don't know how to proceed! Update: Please suggest me some tools that can ask me the questions and help me aggregate important details. How can I have diagram that I talked about for requirement verification?

Read the article

Silverlight 4 Twitter Client – Part 3

- by Max

Finally Silverlight 4 RC is released and also that Windows 7 Phone Series will rely heavily on Silverlight platform for apps platform. its a really good news for Silverlight developers and designers. More information on this here. You can use SL 4 RC with VS 2010. SL 4 RC does not come with VS 2010, you need to download it separately and install it. So for the next part, be ready with VS 2010 and SL4 RC, we will start using them and not With this momentum, let us go to the next part of our twitter client tutorial. This tutorial will cover setting your status in Twitter and also retrieving your 1) As everything in Silverlight is asynchronous, we need to have some visual representation showing that something is going on in the background. So what I did was to create a progress bar with indeterminate animation. The XAML is here below. <ProgressBar Maximum="100" Width="300" Height="50" Margin="20" Visibility="Collapsed" IsIndeterminate="True" Name="progressBar1" VerticalAlignment="Center" HorizontalAlignment="Center" /> 2) I will be toggling this progress bar to show the background work. So I thought of writing this small method, which I use to toggle the visibility of this progress bar. Just pass a bool to this method and this will toggle it based on its current visibility status. public void toggleProgressBar(bool Option){ if (Option) { if (progressBar1.Visibility == System.Windows.Visibility.Collapsed) progressBar1.Visibility = System.Windows.Visibility.Visible; } else { if (progressBar1.Visibility == System.Windows.Visibility.Visible) progressBar1.Visibility = System.Windows.Visibility.Collapsed; }} 3) Now let us create a grid to hold a textbox and a update button. The XAML will look like something below <Grid HorizontalAlignment="Center"> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition Height="50"></RowDefinition> </Grid.RowDefinitions> <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <ColumnDefinition Width="400"></ColumnDefinition> <ColumnDefinition Width="200"></ColumnDefinition> </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <TextBox Name="TwitterStatus" Width="380" Height="50"></TextBox> <Button Name="UpdateStatus" Content="Update" Grid.Row="1" Grid.Column="2" Width="200" Height="50" Click="UpdateStatus_Click"></Button></Grid> 4) The click handler for this update button will be again using the Web Client to post values. Posting values using Web Client. The code is: private void UpdateStatus_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e){ toggleProgressBar(true); string statusupdate = "status=" + TwitterStatus.Text; WebRequest.RegisterPrefix("https://", System.Net.Browser.WebRequestCreator.ClientHttp); WebClient myService = new WebClient(); myService.AllowReadStreamBuffering = true; myService.UseDefaultCredentials = false; myService.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(GlobalVariable.getUserName(), GlobalVariable.getPassword()); myService.UploadStringCompleted += new UploadStringCompletedEventHandler(myService_UploadStringCompleted); myService.UploadStringAsync(new Uri("https://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml"), statusupdate); this.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(() => ClearTextBoxValue());} 5) In the above code, we have a event handler which will be fired on this request is completed – !! Remember SL is Asynch !! So in the myService_UploadStringCompleted, we will just toggle the progress bar and change some status text to say that its done. The code for this will be StatusMessage is just another textblock conveniently positioned in the page. void myService_UploadStringCompleted(object sender, UploadStringCompletedEventArgs e){ if (e.Error != null) { StatusMessage.Text = "Status Update Failed: " + e.Error.Message.ToString(); } else { toggleProgressBar(false); TwitterCredentialsSubmit(); }} 6) Now let us look at fetching the friends updates of the logged in user and displaying it in a datagrid. So just define a data grid and set its autogenerate columns as true. 7) Let us first create a data structure for use with fetching the friends timeline. The code is something like below: namespace MaxTwitter.Classes{ public class Status { public Status() {} public string ID { get; set; } public string Text { get; set; } public string Source { get; set; } public string UserID { get; set; } public string UserName { get; set; } }} You can add as many fields as you want, for the list of fields, have a look at here. It will ask for your Twitter username and password, just provide them and this will display the xml file. Go through them pick and choose your desired fields and include in your Data Structure. 8) Now the web client request for this is similar to the one we saw in step 4. Just change the uri in the last but one step to https://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.xml Be sure to change the event handler to something else and within that we will use XLINQ to fetch the required details for us. Now let us how this event handler fetches details. public void parseXML(string text){ XDocument xdoc; if(text.Length> 0) xdoc = XDocument.Parse(text); else xdoc = XDocument.Parse(@"I USED MY OWN LOCAL COPY OF XML FILE HERE FOR OFFLINE TESTING"); statusList = new List<Status>(); statusList = (from status in xdoc.Descendants("status") select new Status { ID = status.Element("id").Value, Text = status.Element("text").Value, Source = status.Element("source").Value, UserID = status.Element("user").Element("id").Value, UserName = status.Element("user").Element("screen_name").Value, }).ToList(); //MessageBox.Show(text); //this.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(() => CallDatabindMethod(StatusCollection)); //MessageBox.Show(statusList.Count.ToString()); DataGridStatus.ItemsSource = statusList; StatusMessage.Text = "Datagrid refreshed."; toggleProgressBar(false);} in the event handler, we call this method with e.Result.ToString() Parsing XML files using LINQ is super cool, I love it. I am stopping it here for this post. Will post the completed files in next post, as I’ve worked on a few more features in this page and don’t want to confuse you. See you soon in my next post where will play with Twitter lists. Have a nice day! Technorati Tags: Silverlight,LINQ,XLINQ,Twitter API,Twitter,Network Credentials

Read the article

WPF animation: binding to the "To" attribute of storyboard animation.

- by bozalina

Hi, I'm trying to create a button that behaves similarly to the "slide" button on the iPhone. I have an animation that adjusts the position and width of the button, but I want these values to be based on the text used in the control. Currently, they're hardcoded. Here's my working XAML, so far: <CheckBox x:Class="Smt.Controls.SlideCheckBox" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" xmlns:local="clr-namespace:Smt.Controls" xmlns:System.Windows="clr-namespace:System.Windows;assembly=PresentationCore" Name="SliderCheckBox" mc:Ignorable="d"> <CheckBox.Resources> <System.Windows:Duration x:Key="AnimationTime">0:0:0.2</System.Windows:Duration> <Storyboard x:Key="OnChecking"> <DoubleAnimation Storyboard.TargetName="CheckButton" Storyboard.TargetProperty="(UIElement.RenderTransform).(TransformGroup.Children)[0].(TranslateTransform.X)" Duration="{StaticResource AnimationTime}" To="40" /> <DoubleAnimation Storyboard.TargetName="CheckButton" Storyboard.TargetProperty="(Button.Width)" Duration="{StaticResource AnimationTime}" To="41" /> </Storyboard> <Storyboard x:Key="OnUnchecking"> <DoubleAnimation Storyboard.TargetName="CheckButton" Storyboard.TargetProperty="(UIElement.RenderTransform).(TransformGroup.Children)[0].(TranslateTransform.X)" Duration="{StaticResource AnimationTime}" To="0" /> <DoubleAnimation Storyboard.TargetName="CheckButton" Storyboard.TargetProperty="(Button.Width)" Duration="{StaticResource AnimationTime}" To="40" /> </Storyboard> <Style x:Key="SlideCheckBoxStyle" TargetType="{x:Type local:SlideCheckBox}"> <Setter Property="Template"> <Setter.Value> <ControlTemplate TargetType="{x:Type local:SlideCheckBox}"> <Canvas> <ContentPresenter SnapsToDevicePixels="{TemplateBinding SnapsToDevicePixels}" Content="{TemplateBinding Content}" ContentTemplate="{TemplateBinding ContentTemplate}" RecognizesAccessKey="True" VerticalAlignment="Center" HorizontalAlignment="Center" /> <Canvas>  <Rectangle Width="{Binding ElementName=ButtonText, Path=ActualWidth}" Height="{Binding ElementName=ButtonText, Path=ActualHeight}" Fill="LightBlue" /> </Canvas> <Canvas>  <Button Width="{Binding ElementName=CheckedText, Path=ActualWidth}" Height="{Binding ElementName=ButtonText, Path=ActualHeight}" Name="CheckButton" Command="{x:Static local:SlideCheckBox.SlideCheckBoxClicked}"> <Button.RenderTransform> <TransformGroup> <TranslateTransform /> </TransformGroup> </Button.RenderTransform> </Button> </Canvas> <Canvas>  <StackPanel Name="ButtonText" Orientation="Horizontal" IsHitTestVisible="False"> <Grid Name="CheckedText"> <Label Margin="7 0" Content="{Binding RelativeSource={RelativeSource AncestorType={x:Type local:SlideCheckBox}}, Path=CheckedText}" /> </Grid> <Grid Name="UncheckedText" HorizontalAlignment="Right"> <Label Margin="7 0" Content="{Binding RelativeSource={RelativeSource AncestorType={x:Type local:SlideCheckBox}}, Path=UncheckedText}" /> </Grid> </StackPanel> </Canvas> </Canvas> <ControlTemplate.Triggers> <Trigger Property="IsChecked" Value="True"> <Trigger.EnterActions> <BeginStoryboard Storyboard="{StaticResource OnChecking}" /> </Trigger.EnterActions> <Trigger.ExitActions> <BeginStoryboard Storyboard="{StaticResource OnUnchecking}" /> </Trigger.ExitActions> </Trigger> </ControlTemplate.Triggers> </ControlTemplate> </Setter.Value> </Setter> </Style> </CheckBox.Resources> <CheckBox.CommandBindings> <CommandBinding Command="{x:Static local:SlideCheckBox.SlideCheckBoxClicked}" Executed="OnSlideCheckBoxClicked" /> </CheckBox.CommandBindings> </CheckBox> And the code behind: using System.Windows; using System.Windows.Controls; using System.Windows.Input; namespace Smt.Controls { public partial class SlideCheckBox : CheckBox { public SlideCheckBox() { InitializeComponent(); Loaded += OnLoaded; } public static readonly DependencyProperty CheckedTextProperty = DependencyProperty.Register("CheckedText", typeof(string), typeof(SlideCheckBox), new PropertyMetadata("Checked Text")); public string CheckedText { get { return (string)GetValue(CheckedTextProperty); } set { SetValue(CheckedTextProperty, value); } } public static readonly DependencyProperty UncheckedTextProperty = DependencyProperty.Register("UncheckedText", typeof(string), typeof(SlideCheckBox), new PropertyMetadata("Unchecked Text")); public string UncheckedText { get { return (string)GetValue(UncheckedTextProperty); } set { SetValue(UncheckedTextProperty, value); } } public static readonly RoutedCommand SlideCheckBoxClicked = new RoutedCommand(); void OnLoaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { Style style = TryFindResource("SlideCheckBoxStyle") as Style; if (!ReferenceEquals(style, null)) { Style = style; } } void OnSlideCheckBoxClicked(object sender, ExecutedRoutedEventArgs e) { IsChecked = !IsChecked; } } } The problem comes when I try to bind the "To" attribute in the DoubleAnimations to the actual width of the text, the same as I'm doing in the ControlTemplate. If I bind the values to an ActualWidth of an element in the ControlTemplate, the control comes up as a blank checkbox (my base class). However, I'm binding to the same ActualWidths in the ControlTemplate itself without any problems. Just seems to be the CheckBox.Resources that have a problem with it. For instance, the following will break it: <DoubleAnimation Storyboard.TargetName="CheckButton" Storyboard.TargetProperty="(Button.Width)" Duration="{StaticResource AnimationTime}" To="{Binding ElementName=CheckedText, Path=ActualWidth}" /> I don't know whether this is because it's trying to bind to a value that doesn't exist until a render pass is done, or if it's something else. Anyone have any experience with this sort of animation binding?

Read the article

MVVM/WPF: DataTemplate is not changed in Wizard

- by msfanboy

Hello, I wonder why my contentcontrol(headeredcontentcontrol) does not change the datatemplates when I press the previous/next button. While debugging everything seems ok means I jump forth and back the collection of wizardpages but always the first page is shown and its header text not the usercontrol is visible. What do I have forgotten? using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using GalaSoft.MvvmLight.Command; using System.Collections.ObjectModel; using System.Diagnostics; using System.ComponentModel; namespace TBM.ViewModel { public class WizardMainViewModel { WizardPageViewModelBase _currentPage; ReadOnlyCollection _pages; RelayCommand _moveNextCommand; RelayCommand _movePreviousCommand; public WizardMainViewModel() { this.CurrentPage = this.Pages[0]; } public RelayCommand MoveNextCommand { get { return _moveNextCommand ?? (_moveNextCommand = new RelayCommand(() => this.MoveToNextPage(), () => this.CanMoveToNextPage)); } } public RelayCommand MovePreviousCommand { get { return _movePreviousCommand ?? (_movePreviousCommand = new RelayCommand( () => this.MoveToPreviousPage(), () => this.CanMoveToPreviousPage)); } } bool CanMoveToPreviousPage { get { return 0 < this.CurrentPageIndex; } } bool CanMoveToNextPage { get { return this.CurrentPage != null && this.CurrentPage.IsValid(); } } void MoveToPreviousPage() { this.CurrentPage = this.Pages[this.CurrentPageIndex - 1]; } void MoveToNextPage() { if (this.CurrentPageIndex < this.Pages.Count - 1) this.CurrentPage = this.Pages[this.CurrentPageIndex + 1]; } /// <summary> /// Returns the page ViewModel that the user is currently viewing. /// </summary> public WizardPageViewModelBase CurrentPage { get { return _currentPage; } private set { if (value == _currentPage) return; if (_currentPage != null) _currentPage.IsCurrentPage = false; _currentPage = value; if (_currentPage != null) _currentPage.IsCurrentPage = true; this.OnPropertyChanged("CurrentPage"); this.OnPropertyChanged("IsOnLastPage"); } } public bool IsOnLastPage { get { return this.CurrentPageIndex == this.Pages.Count - 1; } } /// <summary> /// Returns a read-only collection of all page ViewModels. /// </summary> public ReadOnlyCollection<WizardPageViewModelBase> Pages { get { return _pages ?? CreatePages(); } } ReadOnlyCollection<WizardPageViewModelBase> CreatePages() { WizardPageViewModelBase welcomePage = new WizardWelcomePageViewModel(); WizardPageViewModelBase schoolclassPage = new WizardSchoolclassSubjectPageViewModel(); WizardPageViewModelBase lessonPage = new WizardLessonTimesPageViewModel(); WizardPageViewModelBase timetablePage = new WizardTimeTablePageViewModel(); WizardPageViewModelBase finishPage = new WizardFinishPageViewModel(); var pages = new List<WizardPageViewModelBase>(); pages.Add(welcomePage); pages.Add(schoolclassPage); pages.Add(lessonPage); pages.Add(timetablePage); pages.Add(finishPage); return _pages = new ReadOnlyCollection<WizardPageViewModelBase>(pages); } int CurrentPageIndex { get { if (this.CurrentPage == null) { Debug.Fail("Why is the current page null?"); return -1; } return this.Pages.IndexOf(this.CurrentPage); } } public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged; void OnPropertyChanged(string propertyName) { PropertyChangedEventHandler handler = this.PropertyChanged; if (handler != null) handler(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(propertyName)); } } } <UserControl x:Class="TBM.View.WizardMainView" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" xmlns:ViewModel="clr-namespace:TBM.ViewModel" xmlns:View="clr-namespace:TBM.View" mc:Ignorable="d" > <UserControl.Resources> <DataTemplate DataType="{x:Type ViewModel:WizardWelcomePageViewModel}"> <View:WizardWelcomePageView /> </DataTemplate> <DataTemplate DataType="{x:Type ViewModel:WizardSchoolclassSubjectPageViewModel}"> <View:WizardSchoolclassSubjectPageView /> </DataTemplate> <DataTemplate DataType="{x:Type ViewModel:WizardLessonTimesPageViewModel}"> <View:WizardLessonTimesPageView /> </DataTemplate> <DataTemplate DataType="{x:Type ViewModel:WizardTimeTablePageViewModel}"> <View:WizardTimeTablePageView /> </DataTemplate> <DataTemplate DataType="{x:Type ViewModel:WizardFinishPageViewModel}"> <View:WizardFinishPageView /> </DataTemplate>  <Style BasedOn="{StaticResource {x:Type Button}}" TargetType="{x:Type Button}" x:Key="moveNextButtonStyle"> <Setter Property="Content" Value="Next" /> <Style.Triggers> <DataTrigger Binding="{Binding Path=IsOnLastPage}" Value="True"> <Setter Property="Content" Value="Finish}" /> </DataTrigger> </Style.Triggers> </Style> <ViewModel:WizardMainViewModel x:Key="WizardMainViewModelID" /> </UserControl.Resources> <Grid DataContext="{Binding ., Source={StaticResource WizardMainViewModelID}}" > <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition Height="310*" /> <RowDefinition Height="51*" /> </Grid.RowDefinitions>  <Grid Grid.Row="0" Background="LightGoldenrodYellow"> <HeaderedContentControl Content="{Binding CurrentPage}" Header="{Binding Path=CurrentPage.DisplayName}" /> </Grid>  <Grid Grid.Row="1" Background="Aquamarine"> <StackPanel HorizontalAlignment="Center" Orientation="Horizontal"> <Button Command="{Binding MovePreviousCommand}" Content="Previous" /> <Button Command="{Binding MoveNextCommand}" Style="{StaticResource moveNextButtonStyle}" Content="Next" /> <Button Command="{Binding CancelCommand}" Content="Cancel" /> </StackPanel> </Grid> </Grid>

Read the article

How do I get the PreviewDialog of Apache FOP to actually display my document?

- by JRSofty

Search as I may I have not found a solution to my problem here and I'm hoping the combined minds of StackOverflow will push me in the right direction. My problem is as follows, I'm developing a print and print preview portion of a messaging system's user agent. I was given specific XSLT templates that after transforming XML will produce a Formatting Objects document. With Apache FOP I've been able to render the FO document into PDF which is all fine and good, but I would also like to display it in a print preview dialog. Apache FOP contains such a class called PreviewDialog which requires in its constructor a FOUserAgent, which I can generate, and an object implementing the Renderable Interface. The Renderable Interface has one implementing class in the FOP package which is called InputHandler which takes in its constructor a standard io File object. Now here is where the trouble begins. I'm currently storing the FO document as a temp file and pass this as a File object to an InputHandler instance which is then passed to the PreviewDialog. I see the dialog appear on my screen and along the bottom in a status bar it says that it is generating the document, and that is all it does. Here is the code I'm trying to use. It isn't production code so it's not pretty: import java.io.BufferedOutputStream; import java.io.File; import java.io.FileNotFoundException; import java.io.FileOutputStream; import java.io.IOException; import java.io.OutputStream; import java.util.Random; import javax.xml.transform.Result; import javax.xml.transform.Source; import javax.xml.transform.Transformer; import javax.xml.transform.TransformerConfigurationException; import javax.xml.transform.TransformerException; import javax.xml.transform.TransformerFactory; import javax.xml.transform.sax.SAXResult; import javax.xml.transform.stream.StreamResult; import javax.xml.transform.stream.StreamSource; import org.apache.fop.apps.FOPException; import org.apache.fop.apps.FOUserAgent; import org.apache.fop.apps.Fop; import org.apache.fop.apps.FopFactory; import org.apache.fop.cli.InputHandler; import org.apache.fop.render.awt.viewer.PreviewDialog; public class PrintPreview { public void showPreview(final File xslt, final File xmlSource) { boolean err = false; OutputStream out = null; Transformer transformer = null; final String tempFileName = this.getTempDir() + this.generateTempFileName(); final String tempFoFile = tempFileName + ".fo"; final String tempPdfFile = tempFileName + ".pdf"; System.out.println(tempFileName); final TransformerFactory transformFactory = TransformerFactory .newInstance(); final FopFactory fopFactory = FopFactory.newInstance(); try { transformer = transformFactory .newTransformer(new StreamSource(xslt)); final Source src = new StreamSource(xmlSource); out = new FileOutputStream(tempFoFile); final Result res = new StreamResult(out); transformer.transform(src, res); System.out.println("XSLT Transform Completed"); } catch (final TransformerConfigurationException e) { err = true; e.printStackTrace(); } catch (final FileNotFoundException e) { err = true; e.printStackTrace(); } catch (final TransformerException e) { err = true; e.printStackTrace(); } finally { if (out != null) { try { out.close(); } catch (final IOException e) { // TODO Auto-generated catch block e.printStackTrace(); } } } System.out.println("Initializing Preview"); transformer = null; out = null; final File fo = new File(tempFoFile); final File pdf = new File(tempPdfFile); if (!err) { final FOUserAgent ua = fopFactory.newFOUserAgent(); try { transformer = transformFactory.newTransformer(); out = new FileOutputStream(pdf); out = new BufferedOutputStream(out); final Fop fop = fopFactory.newFop( MimeConstants.MIME_PDF, ua, out); final Source foSrc = new StreamSource(fo); final Result foRes = new SAXResult(fop.getDefaultHandler()); transformer.transform(foSrc, foRes); System.out.println("Transformation Complete"); } catch (final FOPException e) { err = true; e.printStackTrace(); } catch (final FileNotFoundException e) { err = true; e.printStackTrace(); } catch (final TransformerException e) { err = true; e.printStackTrace(); } finally { if (out != null) { try { out.close(); } catch (final IOException e) { // TODO Auto-generated catch block e.printStackTrace(); } } } if (!err) { System.out.println("Attempting to Preview"); final InputHandler inputHandler = new InputHandler(fo); PreviewDialog.createPreviewDialog(ua, inputHandler, true); } } // perform the clean up // f.delete(); } private String getTempDir() { final String p = "java.io.tmpdir"; return System.getProperty(p); } private String generateTempFileName() { final String charset = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890"; final StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer(); Random r = new Random(); int seed = r.nextInt(); r = new Random(seed); for (int i = 0; i < 8; i++) { final int n = r.nextInt(71); seed = r.nextInt(); sb.append(charset.charAt(n)); r = new Random(seed); } return sb.toString(); } } Any help on this would be appreciated.

Read the article

How to use iterator in nested arraylist

- by Muhammad Abrar

I am trying to build an NFA with a special purpose of searching, which is totally different from regex. The State has following format class State implements List{ //GLOBAL DATA static int depth; //STATE VALUES String stateName; ArrayList<String> label = new ArrayList<>(); //Label for states //LINKS TO OTHER STATES boolean finalState; ArrayList<State> nextState ; // Link with multiple next states State preState; // previous state public State() { stateName = ""; finalState = true; nextState = new ArrayList<>(); } public void addlabel(String lbl) { if(!this.label.contains(lbl)) this.label.add(lbl); } public State(String state, String lbl) { this.stateName = state; if(!this.label.contains(lbl)) this.label.add(lbl); depth++; } public State(String state, String lbl, boolean fstate) { this.stateName = state; this.label.add(lbl); this.finalState = fstate; this.nextState = new ArrayList<>(); } void displayState() { System.out.print(this.stateName+" --> "); for(Iterator<String> it = label.iterator(); it.hasNext();) { System.out.print(it.next()+" , "); } System.out.println("\nNo of States : "+State.depth); } Next, the NFA class is public class NFA { static final String[] STATES= {"A","B","C","D","E","F","G","H","I","J","K","L","M" ,"N","O","P","Q","R","S","T","U","V","W","X","Y","Z"}; State startState; State currentState; static int level; public NFA() { startState = new State(); startState = null; currentState = new State(); currentState = null; startState = currentState; } /** * * @param st */ NFA(State startstate) { startState = new State(); startState = startstate; currentState = new State(); currentState = null; currentState = startState ; // To show that their is only one element in NFA } boolean insertState(State newState) { newState.nextState = new ArrayList<>(); if(currentState == null && startState == null ) //if empty NFA { newState.preState = null; startState = newState; currentState = newState; State.depth = 0; return true; } else { if(!Exist(newState.stateName))//Exist is used to check for duplicates { newState.preState = currentState ; currentState.nextState.add(newState); currentState = newState; State.depth++; return true; } } return false; } boolean insertState(State newState, String label) { newState.label.add(label); newState.nextState = null; newState.preState = null; if(currentState == null && startState == null) { startState = newState; currentState = newState; State.depth = 0; return true; } else { if(!Exist(newState.stateName)) { newState.preState = currentState; currentState.nextState.add(newState); currentState = newState; State.depth++; return true; } else { ///code goes here } } return false; } void markFinal(State s) { s.finalState = true; } void unmarkFinal(State s) { s.finalState = false; } boolean Exist(String s) { State temp = startState; if(startState.stateName.equals(s)) return true; Iterator<State> it = temp.nextState.iterator(); while(it.hasNext()) { Iterator<State> i = it ;//startState.nextState.iterator(); { while(i.hasNext()) { if(i.next().stateName.equals(s)) return true; } } //else // return false; } return false; } void displayNfa() { State st = startState; if(startState == null && currentState == null) { System.out.println("The NFA is empty"); } else { while(st != null) { if(!st.nextState.isEmpty()) { Iterator<State> it = st.nextState.iterator(); do { st.displayState(); st = it.next(); }while(it.hasNext()); } else { st = null; } } } System.out.println(); } /** * @param args the command line arguments */ /** * * @param args the command line arguments */ public static void main(String[] args) { // TODO code application logic here NFA l = new NFA(); State s = new State("A11", "a",false); NFA ll = new NFA(s); s = new State("A111", "a",false); ll.insertState(s); ll.insertState(new State("A1","0")); ll.insertState(new State("A1111","0")); ll.displayNfa(); int j = 1; for(int i = 0 ; i < 2 ; i++) { int rand = (int) (Math.random()* 10); State st = new State(STATES[rand],String.valueOf(i), false); if(l.insertState(st)) { System.out.println(j+" : " + STATES[rand]+" and "+String.valueOf(i)+ " inserted"); j++; } } l.displayNfa(); System.out.println("No of states inserted : "+ j--); } I want to do the following This program always skip to display the last state i.e. if there are 10 states inserted, it will display only 9. In exist() method , i used two iterator but i do not know why it is working I have no idea how to perform searching for the existing class name, when dealing with iterators. How should i keep track of current State, properly iterate through the nextState List, Label List in a depth first order. How to insert unique States i.e. if State "A" is inserted once, it should not insert it again (The exist method is not working) Best Regards

Read the article

.NET WebRequest.PreAuthenticate not quite what it sounds like

- by Rick Strahl

I’ve run into the problem a few times now: How to pre-authenticate .NET WebRequest calls doing an HTTP call to the server – essentially send authentication credentials on the very first request instead of waiting for a server challenge first? At first glance this sound like it should be easy: The .NET WebRequest object has a PreAuthenticate property which sounds like it should force authentication credentials to be sent on the first request. Looking at the MSDN example certainly looks like it does: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.net.webrequest.preauthenticate.aspx Unfortunately the MSDN sample is wrong. As is the text of the Help topic which incorrectly leads you to believe that PreAuthenticate… wait for it - pre-authenticates. But it doesn’t allow you to set credentials that are sent on the first request. What this property actually does is quite different. It doesn’t send credentials on the first request but rather caches the credentials ONCE you have already authenticated once. Http Authentication is based on a challenge response mechanism typically where the client sends a request and the server responds with a 401 header requesting authentication. So the client sends a request like this: GET /wconnect/admin/wc.wc?_maintain~ShowStatus HTTP/1.1 Host: rasnote User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 (.NET CLR 4.0.20506) Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 Accept-Language: en,de;q=0.7,en-us;q=0.3 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7 Keep-Alive: 300 Connection: keep-alive and the server responds with: HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized Cache-Control: private Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5 WWW-Authenticate: basic realm=rasnote" X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727 WWW-Authenticate: Negotiate WWW-Authenticate: NTLM WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="rasnote" X-Powered-By: ASP.NET Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:58:20 GMT Content-Length: 5163 plus the actual error message body. The client then is responsible for re-sending the current request with the authentication token information provided (in this case Basic Auth): GET /wconnect/admin/wc.wc?_maintain~ShowStatus HTTP/1.1 Host: rasnote User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 (.NET CLR 4.0.20506) Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 Accept-Language: en,de;q=0.7,en-us;q=0.3 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7 Keep-Alive: 300 Connection: keep-alive Cookie: TimeTrakker=2HJ1998WH06696; WebLogCommentUser=Rick Strahl|http://www.west-wind.com/|[email protected]; WebStoreUser=b8bd0ed9 Authorization: Basic cgsf12aDpkc2ZhZG1zMA== Once the authorization info is sent the server responds with the actual page result. Now if you use WebRequest (or WebClient) the default behavior is to re-authenticate on every request that requires authorization. This means if you look in Fiddler or some other HTTP client Proxy that captures requests you’ll see that each request re-authenticates: Here are two requests fired back to back: and you can see the 401 challenge, the 200 response for both requests. If you watch this same conversation between a browser and a server you’ll notice that the first 401 is also there but the subsequent 401 requests are not present. WebRequest.PreAuthenticate And this is precisely what the WebRequest.PreAuthenticate property does: It’s a caching mechanism that caches the connection credentials for a given domain in the active process and resends it on subsequent requests. It does not send credentials on the first request but it will cache credentials on subsequent requests after authentication has succeeded: string url = "http://rasnote/wconnect/admin/wc.wc?_maintain~ShowStatus"; HttpWebRequest req = HttpWebRequest.Create(url) as HttpWebRequest; req.PreAuthenticate = true; req.Credentials = new NetworkCredential("rick", "secret", "rasnote"); req.AuthenticationLevel = System.Net.Security.AuthenticationLevel.MutualAuthRequested; req.UserAgent = ": Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 (.NET CLR 4.0.20506)"; WebResponse resp = req.GetResponse(); resp.Close(); req = HttpWebRequest.Create(url) as HttpWebRequest; req.PreAuthenticate = true; req.Credentials = new NetworkCredential("rstrahl", "secret", "rasnote"); req.AuthenticationLevel = System.Net.Security.AuthenticationLevel.MutualAuthRequested; req.UserAgent = ": Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 (.NET CLR 4.0.20506)"; resp = req.GetResponse(); which results in the desired sequence: where only the first request doesn’t send credentials. This is quite useful as it saves quite a few round trips to the server – bascially it saves one auth request request for every authenticated request you make. In most scenarios I think you’d want to send these credentials this way but one downside to this is that there’s no way to log out the client. Since the client always sends the credentials once authenticated only an explicit operation ON THE SERVER can undo the credentials by forcing another login explicitly (ie. re-challenging with a forced 401 request). Forcing Basic Authentication Credentials on the first Request On a few occasions I’ve needed to send credentials on a first request – mainly to some oddball third party Web Services (why you’d want to use Basic Auth on a Web Service is beyond me – don’t ask but it’s not uncommon in my experience). This is true of certain services that are using Basic Authentication (especially some Apache based Web Services) and REQUIRE that the authentication is sent right from the first request. No challenge first. Ugly but there it is. Now the following works only with Basic Authentication because it’s pretty straight forward to create the Basic Authorization ‘token’ in code since it’s just an unencrypted encoding of the user name and password into base64. As you might guess this is totally unsecure and should only be used when using HTTPS/SSL connections (i’m not in this example so I can capture the Fiddler trace and my local machine doesn’t have a cert installed, but for production apps ALWAYS use SSL with basic auth). The idea is that you simply add the required Authorization header to the request on your own along with the authorization string that encodes the username and password: string url = "http://rasnote/wconnect/admin/wc.wc?_maintain~ShowStatus"; HttpWebRequest req = HttpWebRequest.Create(url) as HttpWebRequest; string user = "rick"; string pwd = "secret"; string domain = "www.west-wind.com"; string auth = "Basic " + Convert.ToBase64String(System.Text.Encoding.Default.GetBytes(user + ":" + pwd)); req.PreAuthenticate = true; req.AuthenticationLevel = System.Net.Security.AuthenticationLevel.MutualAuthRequested;req.Headers.Add("Authorization", auth); req.UserAgent = ": Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 (.NET CLR 4.0.20506)"; WebResponse resp = req.GetResponse(); resp.Close(); This works and causes the request to immediately send auth information to the server. However, this only works with Basic Auth because you can actually create the authentication credentials easily on the client because it’s essentially clear text. The same doesn’t work for Windows or Digest authentication since you can’t easily create the authentication token on the client and send it to the server. Another issue with this approach is that PreAuthenticate has no effect when you manually force the authentication. As far as Web Request is concerned it never sent the authentication information so it’s not actually caching the value any longer. If you run 3 requests in a row like this: string url = "http://rasnote/wconnect/admin/wc.wc?_maintain~ShowStatus"; HttpWebRequest req = HttpWebRequest.Create(url) as HttpWebRequest; string user = "ricks"; string pwd = "secret"; string domain = "www.west-wind.com"; string auth = "Basic " + Convert.ToBase64String(System.Text.Encoding.Default.GetBytes(user + ":" + pwd)); req.PreAuthenticate = true; req.Headers.Add("Authorization", auth); req.UserAgent = ": Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 (.NET CLR 4.0.20506)"; WebResponse resp = req.GetResponse(); resp.Close(); req = HttpWebRequest.Create(url) as HttpWebRequest; req.PreAuthenticate = true; req.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(user, pwd, domain); req.UserAgent = ": Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 (.NET CLR 4.0.20506)"; resp = req.GetResponse(); resp.Close(); req = HttpWebRequest.Create(url) as HttpWebRequest; req.PreAuthenticate = true; req.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(user, pwd, domain); req.UserAgent = ": Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 (.NET CLR 4.0.20506)"; resp = req.GetResponse(); you’ll find the trace looking like this: where the first request (the one we explicitly add the header to) authenticates, the second challenges, and any subsequent ones then use the PreAuthenticate credential caching. In effect you’ll end up with one extra 401 request in this scenario, which is still better than 401 challenges on each request. Getting Access to WebRequest in Classic .NET Web Service Clients If you’re running a classic .NET Web Service client (non-WCF) one issue with the above is how do you get access to the WebRequest to actually add the custom headers to do the custom Authentication described above? One easy way is to implement a partial class that allows you add headers with something like this: public partial class TaxService { protected NameValueCollection Headers = new NameValueCollection(); public void AddHttpHeader(string key, string value) { this.Headers.Add(key,value); } public void ClearHttpHeaders() { this.Headers.Clear(); } protected override WebRequest GetWebRequest(Uri uri) { HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest) base.GetWebRequest(uri); request.Headers.Add(this.Headers); return request; } } where TaxService is the name of the .NET generated proxy class. In code you can then call AddHttpHeader() anywhere to add additional headers which are sent as part of the GetWebRequest override. Nice and simple once you know where to hook it. For WCF there’s a bit more work involved by creating a message extension as described here: http://weblogs.asp.net/avnerk/archive/2006/04/26/Adding-custom-headers-to-every-WCF-call-_2D00_-a-solution.aspx. FWIW, I think that HTTP header manipulation should be readily available on any HTTP based Web Service client DIRECTLY without having to subclass or implement a special interface hook. But alas a little extra work is required in .NET to make this happen Not a Common Problem, but when it happens… This has been one of those issues that is really rare, but it’s bitten me on several occasions when dealing with oddball Web services – a couple of times in my own work interacting with various Web Services and a few times on customer projects that required interaction with credentials-first services. Since the servers determine the protocol, we don’t have a choice but to follow the protocol. Lovely following standards that implementers decide to ignore, isn’t it? :-}© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in .NET CSharp Web Services

Read the article

Quick guide to Oracle IRM 11g: Configuring SSL

- by Simon Thorpe

Quick guide to Oracle IRM 11g index So far in this guide we have an IRM Server up and running, however I skipped over SSL configuration in the previous article because I wanted to focus in more detail now. You can, if you wish, not bother with setting up SSL, but considering this is a security technology it is worthwhile doing. Contents Setting up a one way, self signed SSL certificate in WebLogic Setting up an official SSL certificate in Apache 2.x Configuring Apache to proxy traffic to the IRM server There are two common scenarios in which an Oracle IRM server is configured. For a development or evaluation system, people usually communicate directly to the WebLogic Server running the IRM service. However in a production environment and for some proof of concept evaluations that require a setup reflecting a production system, the traffic to the IRM server travels via a web server proxy, commonly Apache. In this guide we are building an Oracle Enterprise Linux based IRM service and this article will go over the configuration of SSL in WebLogic and also in Apache. Like in the past articles, we are going to use two host names in the configuration below,irm.company.com will refer to the public Apache server irm.company.internal will refer to the internal WebLogic IRM server Setting up a one way, self signed SSL certificate in WebLogic First lets look at creating just a simple self signed SSL certificate to be used in WebLogic. This is a quick and easy way to get SSL working in your environment, however the downside is that no browsers are going to trust this certificate you create and you'll need to manually install the certificate onto any machine's communicating with the server. This is fine for development or when you have only a few users evaluating the system, but for any significant use it's usually better to have a fully trusted certificate in use and I explain that in the next section. But for now lets go through creating, installing and testing a self signed certificate. We use a library in Java to create the certificates, open a console and running the following commands. Note you should choose your own secure passwords whenever you see password below. [oracle@irm /] source /oracle/middleware/wlserver_10.3/server/bin/setWLSEnv.sh [oracle@irm /] cd /oracle/middleware/user_projects/domains/irm_domain/config/fmwconfig/ [oracle@irm /] java utils.CertGen -selfsigned -certfile MyOwnSelfCA.cer -keyfile MyOwnSelfKey.key -keyfilepass password -cn "irm.oracle.demo" [oracle@irm /] java utils.ImportPrivateKey -keystore MyOwnIdentityStore.jks -storepass password -keypass password -alias trustself -certfile MyOwnSelfCA.cer.pem -keyfile MyOwnSelfKey.key.pem -keyfilepass password [oracle@irm /] keytool -import -trustcacerts -alias trustself -keystore TrustMyOwnSelf.jks -file MyOwnSelfCA.cer.der -keyalg RSA We now have two Java Key Stores, MyOwnIdentityStore.jks and TrustMyOwnSelf.jks. These contain keys and certificates which we will use in WebLogic Server. Now we need to tell the IRM server to use these stores when setting up SSL connections for incoming requests. Make sure the Admin server is running and login into the WebLogic Console at http://irm.company.intranet:7001/console and do the following; In the menu on the left, select the + next to Environment to expose the submenu, then click on Servers. You will see two servers in the list, AdminServer(admin) and IRM_server1. If the IRM server is running, shut it down either by hitting CONTROL + C in the console window it was started from, or you can switch to the CONTROL tab, select IRM_server1 and then select the Shutdown menu and then Force Shutdown Now. In the Configuration tab select IRM_server1 and switch to the Keystores tab. By default WebLogic Server uses it's own demo identity and trust. We are now going to switch to the self signed one's we've just created. So select the Change button and switch to Custom Identity and Custom Trust and hit save. Now we have to complete the resulting fields, the setting's i've used in my evaluation server are below. IdentityCustom Identity Keystore: /oracle/middleware/user_projects/domains/irm_domain/config/fmwconfig/MyOwnIdentityStore.jks Custom Identity Keystore Type: JKS Custom Identity Keystore Passphrase: password Confirm Custom Identity Keystore Passphrase: password TrustCustom Trust Keystore: /oracle/middleware/user_projects/domains/irm_domain/config/fmwconfig/TrustMyOwnSelf.jks Custom Trust Keystore Type: JKS Custom Trust Keystore Passphrase: password Confirm Custom Trust Keystore Passphrase: password Now click on the SSL tab for the IRM_server1 and enter in the alias and passphrase, in my demo here the details are; IdentityPrivate Key Alias: trustself Private Key Passphrase: password Confirm Private Key Passphrase: password And hit save. Now lets test a connection to the IRM server over HTTPS using SSL. Go back to a console window and start the IRM server, a quick reminder on how to do this is... [oracle@irm /] cd /oracle/middleware/user_projects/domains/irm_domain/bin [oracle@irm /] ./startManagedWeblogic IRM_server1 Once running, open a browser and head to the SSL port of the server. By default the IRM server will be listening on the URL https://irm.company.intranet:16101/irm_rights. Note in the example image on the right the port is 7002 because it's a system that has the IRM services installed on the Admin server, this isn't typical (or advisable). Your system is going to have a separate managed server which will be listening on port 16101. Once you open this address you will notice that your browser is going to complain that the server certificate is untrusted. The images on the right show how Firefox displays this error. You are going to be prompted every time you create a new SSL session with the server, both from the browser and more annoyingly from the IRM Desktop. If you plan on always using a self signed certificate, it is worth adding it to the Windows certificate store so that when you are accessing sealed content you do not keep being informed this certificate is not trusted. Follow these instructions (which are for Internet Explorer 8, they may vary for your version of IE.) Start Internet Explorer and open the URL to your IRM server over SSL, e.g. https://irm.company.intranet:16101/irm_rights. IE will complain that about the certificate, click on Continue to this website (not recommended). From the IE Tools menu select Internet Options and from the resulting dialog select Security and then click on Trusted Sites and then the Sites button. Add to the list of trusted sites a URL which mates the server you are accessing, e.g. https://irm.company.intranet/ and select OK. Now refresh the page you were accessing and next to the URL you should see a red cross and the words Certificate Error. Click on this button and select View Certificates. You will now see a dialog with the details of the self signed certificate and the Install Certificate... button should be enabled. Click on this to start the wizard. Click next and you'll be asked where you should install the certificate. Change the option to Place all certificates in the following store. Select browse and choose the Trusted Root Certification Authorities location and hit OK. You'll then be prompted to install the certificate and answer yes. You also need to import the root signed certificate into the same location, so once again select the red Certificate Error option and this time when viewing the certificate, switch to the Certification Path tab and you should see a CertGenCAB certificate. Select this and then click on View Certificate and go through the same process as above to import the certificate into the store. Finally close all instances of the IE browser and re-access the IRM server URL again, this time you should not receive any errors. Setting up an official SSL certificate in Apache 2.x At this point we now have an IRM server that you can communicate with over SSL. However this certificate isn't trusted by any browser because it's path of trust doesn't end in a recognized certificate authority (CA). Also you are communicating directly to the WebLogic Server over a non standard SSL port, 16101. In a production environment it is common to have another device handle the initial public internet traffic and then proxy this to the WebLogic server. The diagram below shows a very simplified view of this type of deployment. What i'm going to walk through next is configuring Apache to proxy traffic to a WebLogic server and also to use a real SSL certificate from an official CA. First step is to configure Apache to handle incoming requests over SSL. In this guide I am configuring the IRM service in Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 update 3 and Apache 2.2.3 which came with OpenSSL and mod_ssl components. Before I purchase an SSL certificate, I need to generate a certificate request from the server. Oracle.com uses Verisign and for my own personal needs I use cheaper certificates from GoDaddy. The following instructions are specific to Apache, but there are many references out there for other web servers. For Apache I have OpenSSL and the commands are; [oracle@irm /] cd /usr/bin [oracle@irm bin] openssl genrsa -des3 -out irm-apache-server.key 2048 Generating RSA private key, 2048 bit long modulus ............................+++ .........+++ e is 65537 (0x10001) Enter pass phrase for irm-apache-server.key: Verifying - Enter pass phrase for irm-apache-server.key: [oracle@irm bin] openssl req -new -key irm-apache-server.key -out irm-apache-server.csr Enter pass phrase for irm-apache-server.key: You are about to be asked to enter information that will be incorporated into your certificate request. What you are about to enter is what is called a Distinguished Name or a DN. There are quite a few fields but you can leave some blank For some fields there will be a default value, If you enter '.', the field will be left blank. ----- Country Name (2 letter code) [GB]:US State or Province Name (full name) [Berkshire]:CA Locality Name (eg, city) [Newbury]:San Francisco Organization Name (eg, company) [My Company Ltd]:Oracle Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []:Security Common Name (eg, your name or your server's hostname) []:irm.company.com Email Address []:[email protected] Please enter the following 'extra' attributes to be sent with your certificate request A challenge password []:testing An optional company name []: You must make sure to remember the pass phrase you used in the initial key generation, you will need this when later configuring Apache. In the /usr/bin directory there are now two new files. The irm-apache-server.csr contains our certificate request and is what you cut and paste, or upload, to your certificate authority when you purchase and validate your SSL certificate. In response you will typically get two files. Your server certificate and another certificate file that will likely contain a set of certificates from your CA which validate your certificate's trust. Next we need to configure Apache to use these files. Typically there is an ssl.conf file which is where all the SSL configuration is done. On my Oracle Enterprise Linux server this file is located in /etc/httpd/conf.d/ssl.conf and i've added the following lines. <VirtualHost irm.company.com> # Setup SSL for irm.company.com ServerName irm.company.com SSLEngine On SSLCertificateFile /oracle/secure/irm.company.com.crt SSLCertificateKeyFile /oracle/secure/irm.company.com.key SSLCertificateChainFile /oracle/secure/gd_bundle.crt </VirtualHost> Restarting Apache (apachectl restart) and I can now attempt to connect to the Apache server in a web browser, https://irm.company.com/. If all is configured correctly I should now see an Apache test page delivered to me over HTTPS. Configuring Apache to proxy traffic to the IRM server Final piece in setting up SSL is to have Apache proxy requests for the IRM server but do so securely. So the requests to Apache will be over HTTPS using a legitimate certificate, but we can also configure Apache to proxy these requests internally across to the IRM server using SSL with the self signed certificate we generated at the start of this article. To do this proxying we use the WebLogic Web Server plugin for Apache which you can download here from Oracle. Download the zip file and extract onto the server. The file extraction reveals a set of zip files, each one specific to a supported web server. In my instance I am using Apache 2.2 32bit on an Oracle Enterprise Linux, 64 bit server. If you are not sure what version your Apache server is, run the command /usr/sbin/httpd -V and you'll see version and it its 32 or 64 bit. Mine is a 32bit server so I need to extract the file WLSPlugin1.1-Apache2.2-linux32-x86.zip. The from the resulting lib folder copy the file mod_wl.so into /usr/lib/httpd/modules/. First we want to test that the plug in will work for regular HTTP traffic. Edit the httpd.conf for Apache and add the following section at the bottom. LoadModule weblogic_module modules/mod_wl.so <IfModule mod_weblogic.c> WebLogicHost irm.company.internal WebLogicPort 16100 WLLogFile /tmp/wl-proxy.log </IfModule> <Location /irm_rights> SetHandler weblogic-handler </Location> <Location /irm_desktop> SetHandler weblogic-handler </Location> <Location /irm_sealing> SetHandler weblogic-handler </Location> <Location /irm_services> SetHandler weblogic-handler </Location> Now restart Apache again (apachectl restart) and now open a browser to http://irm.company.com/irm_rights. Apache will proxy the HTTP traffic from the port 80 of your Apache server to the IRM service listening on port 16100 of the WebLogic Managed server. Note above I have included all four of the Locations you might wish to proxy. http://irm.company.internalirm_rights is the URL to the management website, /irm_desktop is the URL used for the IRM Desktop to communicate. irm_sealing is for web services based document sealing and irm_services is for IRM server web services. The last two are typically only used when you have the IRM server integrated with another application and it is unlikely you'd be accessing these resources from the public facing Apache server. However, just in case, i've mentioned them above. Now let's enable SSL communication from Apache to WebLogic. In the ZIP file we extracted were some more modules we need to copy into the Apache folder. Looking back in the lib that we extracted, there are some more files. Copy the following into the /usr/lib/httpd/modules/ folder. libwlssl.so libnnz11.so libclntsh.so.11.1 Now the documentation states that should only need to do this, but I found that I also needed to create an environment variable called LD_LIBRARY_PATH and point this to the folder /usr/lib/httpd/modules/. If I didn't do this, starting Apache with the WebLogic module configured to SSL would throw the error. [crit] (20014)Internal error: WL SSL Init failed for server: (null) on 0 So I had to edit the file /etc/profile and add the following lines at the bottom. You may already have the LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable defined, therefore simply add this path to it. LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/httpd/modules/ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH Now the WebLogic plug in uses an Oracle Wallet to store the required certificates.You'll need to copy the self signed certificate from the IRM server over to the Apache server. Copy over the MyOwnSelfCA.cer.der into the same folder where you are storing your public certificates, in my example this is /oracle/secure. It's worth mentioning these files should ONLY be readable by root (the user Apache runs as). Now lets create an Oracle Wallet and import the self signed certificate from the IRM server. The file orapki was included in the bin folder of the Apache 1.1 plugin zip you extracted. orapki wallet create -wallet /oracle/secure/my-wallet -auto_login_only orapki wallet add -wallet /oracle/secure/my-wallet -trusted_cert -cert MyOwnSelfCA.cer.der -auto_login_only Finally change the httpd.conf to reflect that we want the WebLogic Apache plug-in to use HTTPS/SSL and not just plain HTTP. <IfModule mod_weblogic.c> WebLogicHost irm.company.internal WebLogicPort 16101 SecureProxy ON WLSSLWallet /oracle/secure/my-wallet WLLogFile /tmp/wl-proxy.log </IfModule> Then restart Apache once more and you can go back to the browser to test the communication. Opening the URL https://irm.company.com/irm_rights will proxy your request to the WebLogic server at https://irm.company.internal:16101/irm_rights. At this point you have a fully functional Oracle IRM service, the next step is to create a sealed document and test the entire system.

Search Results

Search found 45840 results on 1834 pages for 'system compromise'.

Page 416/1834 | < Previous Page | 412 413 414 415 416 417 418 419 420 421 422 423 | Next Page >

- by Sylvie MacKenzie, PMP

- by Todd Williamson

- by Phil Factor

- by Compudicted

- by eric.maurice

- by Argenis

- by Ashok_Ora

- by SQLOS Team

- by Michal

- by martin.abrahams

- by Argenis

- by Humprey Cogay, C|EH, E|CSA

- by ricstr

- by dd_dent

- by Liam McLennan

- by Superbest

- by shamim

- by Yugal Jindle

- by Max

- by bozalina

- by msfanboy

- by JRSofty

- by Muhammad Abrar

- by Rick Strahl

- by Simon Thorpe

< Previous Page | 412 413 414 415 416 417 418 419 420 421 422 423 | Next Page >