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  • Powerpoint not drawing in slide properly...

    - by commradepolski
    So got another issue to post about. I have a user here who uses powerpoint a lot, Office 07 with SP2. When he opens up the presentation, powerpoint opens fine without errors, but does not draw in the main slide properly. So to better explain that, the list on the left hand side, that shows the slides and what order they are in, loads up fine. You can see the slides and the content etc. When you click on a slide, to edit it, it does not draw in on the editing screen. Not really sure how to explain that. The screen where the work on the slide is done, is what is affected. This is a screen shot from my pc not the users. So instead of the screen saying "Click to add title" it would be improperly drawn such that if I were to drag an explorer window across it, it would leave a trail. I have tried reinstalling office, updating it, as well as giving the user a new windows image and nothing has helped. Any help or advice is appreciated.

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  • SATA disks boot order?

    - by kire
    I have a computer with 4 SATA disks connected, 2 to the motherboard and 2 to a PCI-card. I've moved all the disks from other computers so 2 of them already has windows installed, the other 2 has just had data on them. I know one of the windows installations works and i want to use this install. If i only have this disk connected the computer boots fine. The problem is that when i boot with all 4 disks connected i get an error message about not being able to boot. This message is in swedish(the wrong windows installation is swedish) so it has to come from that installation. Ok, that means it is trying to boot from wrong disk, i try to pull out that disk but then i get the same error in english. I pull out the fourth disk instead I get another error about NTLDR not being able to load. If i disconnect all drives except the one with the correct windows installation, windows boots fine and i can also connect the other drives while windows is running and browse around in them without any problems. I have no clue what to do. In my BIOS setup i can only select SATA as boot-option, not the order of the disks. I also tried to remove what's left of windows on the other disk by simply deleting everything in explorer(got hidden- and sytstem-files visible). Both windows installations are XP btw. Edit: I switched the cables around and now it magically works. :)

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  • Hourly SQL Server 2005 Slowness (Possibly caused by SYSTEM)

    - by Zorlack
    We're trying to diagnose the cause of slowness on our Database server. We're running the latest rev SQL Server 2005 on Windows 2008x64. The behavior that we're seeing is this: We see the SYSTEM process spike one of the CPUs for about 2 minutes, during this time SQL server slows down by a factor of 10. The slowness lasts until SYSTEM is done, then in an hour everything starts again. During these slowdowns disk writes don't spike, paging doesn't spike, the only noticeable precursor we see is that SYSTEM maxes out one of the sixteen (HT)CPUs. Note that this doesn't happen at the top of the hour, it just happens once an hour, and it shifts a bit depending on the length of the incident. At the moment this is causing intermittent slowdowns, but when the server is really busy it can cause Worker Thread starvation. The server is a Dual Quad Dell R710 with 96GB of RAM and RAID10 data/log disks. Has anyone experienced this kind of problem? Does anyone know where we should look? Edit: SQL Server Version is 9.0.4035

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  • Software disables itself when the PC is accessed via RDP

    - by blckgrffn
    We have a large, specialty printer that has vendor specific software that enables its use outside of it showing up simply as a printer in the Windows Control Panel. This software recognizes when we RDP into the machine and "disconnects" the PC from the printer within its proprietary control panel. All is well when an application like TeamViewer is used to access the machine. Ostensibly, the application is helping us be safe by "enforcing" that the machine used for the printer is a walk up workstation, or so the support folks informed me. If TeamViewer etc, fixes the issue, then what is the problem? We have many headless workstations in our warehouse attached to a variety of specialty machines, all used via RDP. We want/need to keep access to the machines the same for the sanity of our production staff. The meat of the question - how, specifically, might a machine know that it is being accessed via RDP (terminal services management???) and how might this be defeated without altering an application or driver. Of note, the system being used is a Windows 7 Pro machine hooked to the printer via USB. Thanks! Nat edit Is there any combination of /admin switches, etc. that will possibly fix this? Simply putting /admin did not.

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  • Is there a way to create a script/BAT that changes my desktop image... if so how? [duplicate]

    - by Radical924
    This question already has an answer here: How do I set the desktop background on Windows from a script? 4 answers Okay so I just got this program that lets me lock my PC screen (this info doesn't matter much) anyways... You can run files when the program starts/locks and closes/unlocks. What I would like to do is create a script/bat that changes my desktop background to an image when I click "lock" and another script to change the desktop image when I "unlock". Is there a simple script or BAT file that someone knows of that does this??? or knows how to do this??? I would like to be able to modify it myself so it is the picture I would like to be selected. So all I would do is change the file directory of the image used on the background in the BAT file/script. EDIT: Thank you for the link! It hleped out a bit but I still have one question... I will just post it as a separate question... Thx!

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  • Web Server slows down (ASP.NET)

    - by mfeingold
    below is a question I posted on stackoverflow . as suggested by Martin Clarke I also post it here. We have a really strange problem. One of the servers in the server farm becomes really slow. We see a number of timeouts in the logs and overall response time is not where it should be (and is on other servers in the farm). What is also strange is that it is not just the web app - Just logging into the server takes up to 1.5 min to show you the desktop. Once you are in, the system is as responsive as ever - unless you try to launch something, i.e. notepad - it takes another minute to launch and after launch it works fine. I checked a number of things - memory utilization is reasonable, CPU is below 15%, windows handles, event logs do not show anything. Recycling the aps.net process does not fix it - it still takes over a minute to log in. Rebooting the server helped, but now it started to slow down again. After a closer look we found out that Windows Temp directory is full of temp files - over 65k files. This is certainly something to take care of. But my question is could it be the root cause of the sluggishness, or there is still something else lurking in the shadows? Edit After more digging I am zeroing in on the issue related to the size of temp directories. This article: (see the original post this thing will not let me include a second link) describes something very similar. It still does not answer the question why the server is still slow even there is no activity.

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  • ip6tables blocking output traffic

    - by jmccrohan
    My OpenVZ VPS is blocking outbound IPv6 traffic, but correctly filtering inbound IPv6 traffic. Below is my ip6tables-restore script. *filter :INPUT ACCEPT [0:0] :FORWARD ACCEPT [0:0] :OUTPUT ACCEPT [0:0] -A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p ipv6-icmp -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p udp -m udp --dport 1194 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 51413 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p udp -m udp --dport 51413 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -m limit --limit 5/min -A INPUT -j REJECT --reject-with icmp6-adm-prohibited -A FORWARD -j ACCEPT -A OUTPUT -j ACCEPT COMMIT ICMPv6 traffic is still able to pass both inbound and outbound. When I flush these rules using -F, outbound traffic flows fine. What am I missing here? EDIT: It appears that ip6tables is marking ESTABLISHED packets as INVALID. Consequently, the outbound traffic is NOT actually being blocked. The reply packets are not allowed inbound again, hence appearing like blocked outbound traffic. Allowing INVALID packets inbound solves the outbound issue, but also renders the inbound filter useless.

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  • What's the proper way to prepare chroot to recover a broken Linux installation?

    - by ~quack
    This question relates to questions that are asked often. The procedure is frequently mentioned or linked to offsite, but is not often clearly and correctly stated. In an objective to concentrate useful information in one place, this question seeks to provide a clear, correct reference for this procedure. What are the proper steps to prepare a chroot environment for a recovery procedure? In many situations, repairing a broken Linux installation is best done from within the installation. But if the system won't boot, how do you fix it from within? Let's assume you manage to boot into an alternate system. Once there, you need to access your broken installation in order to fix it. Many recovery How-Tos recommend using chroot in order to run programs as if you are actually booted into the broken installation. What is the basic procedure? Are there accepted best-practices to follow? What variables need to be considered in order to adapt the basic preparation steps to a particular recovery task? As this is Community Wiki, feel free to edit this question to improve it as well.

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  • how to throttle http requests on a linux machine?

    - by hooraygradschool
    EDIT: here is the summery: i need to reduce max connections preferably system wide on Ubuntu 11.04 but at least within Google Chrome. i do not need or want to throttle bandwidth, Verizon seems to only care about the number of connections so that is all i want to change. also, i don't want to use firefox unless i have to, i have three other machines all using chrome and synced and i just prefer it over firefox. i use tethering for my home internet connection via my verizon cell phone. without paying for it. this works just fine for streaming netflix via my nintendo wii and pretty much every other conceivable use ive had for it. except, during heavy usage with multiple tabs open on my laptop, the network connection on my phone will just turn off, then on again, then off, but it never fully connects. i think, based on this and other questions that this is caused by verizon getting too many http requests from my phone. is there some software, script, setting or otherwise that would allow me to throttle my requests to say, 5 or 10 or whatever it turns out is 1 less than verizon is looking for, so that my cell's network connection is not lost? i would far prefer a slow down rather than complete shut off of my internet connection. i am almost certain is from quantity of requests and not related to data, because, as i mentioned, netflix will run all day without a hitch, and that uses more data than anything else i would be doing. if i had a router i am pretty sure there are settings i could easily change to only allow so many requests at a time ... but in this case, my phone is my router, so no settings. im using ubuntu 11.04 on my netbook with an htc incredible on verizon (not that the phone details are relevant) i have been trying to figure this out for quite some time, currently the only fix is ensure that all requests are stopped and then sometimes it works again, other times i have to manually turn my 3g service off and then back on. thank you so much for any assistance!

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  • Cannot open /dev/rfcomm1 : Host is down

    - by srj0408
    I am working on raspberry PI and on Bluetooth. I am using old raspberry pi kernel as the new one has got some bugs that were not resolved with respect to the bluez daemon. At present my kernel version is 3.6.11. I am using a USB bluetooth dongle and my sole purpose is to auto connect the bluetooth dongle when ever it is in range. For that i think i have to run a script in the backend on RPI that will keep on checking the existence of usb bluetooth dongle. I started from the very scratch. I installed bluez daemon using apt-get install bluetooth bluez utils blueman and then i used hciconfig which gives me that my bluetooth usb dongle is working fine. But when i did hcitool scan , it give me no device in range even though my Serial bluetooth Device was on. I wasn't able to find any device in vicinity. Also when i unplugged and plug the USB dongle again, i was able to scan the serial device , but when i repeat the process, i find the earlier condition of not finding any deice. I had find another useful link, but that need address of the bluetooth device that need to be connected. I want to automate this using hcitool scan, storing the output to the a file and then comparing it with already paired devices and their name. For that i need to figure out why hcitool scan is sometime working and sometime not. ? Can some one help me in figuring out why this is happening. Is there any problem on hardware side i.e Bluetooth dongle is buggy or i had some problem in bluez utils. Edit 1: While as of now, hcitool scan is giving me my remote device address but still i am getting the same issue of HOUST IS DOWN, '/dev/rfcomm1'. I am really not getting any idea of what to be done.

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  • Diagnosing PC crashes (most often while using shared folders or torrents)

    - by Dyppl
    For the last few weeks my PC (pretty old P4 with WinXP SP3) has been crashing randomly. It just suddenly reboots instanteneously. It feels hardware-related but I wasn't able to determine wether it's software or hardware that causes it. I did notice a pattern though: it's more likely to crash when I copy a lot of files over network or have uTorrent running, but sometimes it crashes when I am not doing anything with it. Copying files from it over network causes it to crash in 1 to 10 minutes almost every time. Using torrents causes it to crash every 1-3 hours. With neither or that on it crashes every 24 hours or so. I ruled out the following probable causes: PSU (I bought a new one and turned off most of the drives so the power is sufficient 100%) Bad HDD or interface cable on my SATA disk from which I was originally copying the data over network (bought new SATA cable and later yanked out the HDD completely, PC still crashes without it) Video adapter (AGP slot is now empty, using the onboard VGA at the moment) Network adapter (removed it from PCI, using onboard LAN) CPU (I think: I changed the termopaste and it's temperature is below 50C) RAM (I think: I ran Memtest86 and it didn't show any errors) At the moment I only have only one system HDD and DVD drives, a mouse and a keyboard plugged in. The fact that it crashes most often when I use network extensively makes me think that maybe it's software related (I removed the network adapter from PCI and now am using an onboard one, so network hardware is unlikely to cause problems). I am now pondering system reinstall but it's not a pleasant solution so I decided to ask wether there are better ideas first. If someone can share a good diagnostic tool it would be great because I didn't find anything good. Thanks in advance, I hope that "help to diagnose" questions aren't entirely banned here. EDIT: Motherboard is actually ~4 years old as I replaced it back in 2007

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  • Multiple if functions

    - by user2948699
    I have problem I'm hoping someone could help me with. I have five different text values in 5 cells. I am trying to combine these values into one cell with a comma in between each. However the trick is that if there is no value in (H6) then it must place the word "and" between the cell (F6) and (G6). If there is a value in (H6) then place the word "and" between (G6) and (H6). In the same statement I must also include If there is not value in (G6) then it must place the word "and" between the cell E6 and F6. Please see image attached. I am trying to get the highlighted statements into one cell. So multiple IF statements into one cell. Anyone? =IF(G8=0,(D8)&", "&(E8)&" and "&(F8),(D8)&", "&(E8)&", "&(F8)&" and "&(G8)=IF(H8=0,(D8)&", "&(E8)&", "&(F8)&" and "&(G8),(D8)&", "&(E8)&", "&(F8)&", "&(G8)&" and "&(H8))) I cant figure out the code. Many thanks. Alex Edit: The original image can be found here if size of the inlined is too small.

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  • Looking for VCS wrapper that tracks system files changing across the whole *nix OS and sends diffs through email

    - by nextus
    I need some software that looks after custom directories across the whole OS (i.e. /etc) and alerting me if someone edit something file inside. Additionally, this tool must automatically commit and push changes into backup server, so I can easily determine when specific change in specific file was made. I'm using cvsbackup right now but I want to create or found something more modern. I think using git as VCS is a great idea. I could have local repository and easily revert changes in my configuration files. Furthermore, pushing changes to the remote repository would helps me to recover my configuration files when the server is fault. It doesn't seems difficult to write some wrapper around the git but there are a lot of problems. For example, I need to track custom directories: /usr/local/nginx/ and /etc/. So the destination point for my git repository is /. I don't need to track the other directories so I must to write overwhelming .gitignore rule: * !.gitignore !/etc/ !etc/* !/usr /usr/* !/usr/local /usr/local/* !/usr/local/nginx !/usr/local/nginx/* It's very daunting and prone to error. So it's maybe a good idea to create intermediate file that wrapper reads and converts to .gitignore format. Additionally, I don't want to keep my .git folder in / partition so I need to set appropriate GIT_DIR and GIT_WORK_TREE variables for git. Is there any ready to use tools for implementation this task? I don't found any but I don't believe that no one needs this feature.

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  • Deploying Memcached as 32bit or 64bit?

    - by rlotun
    I'm curious about how people deploy memcached on 64 bit machines. Do you compile a 64bit (standard) memcached binary and run that, or do people compile it in 32bit mode and run N instances (where N = machine_RAM / 4GB)? Consider a recommended deployment of Redis (from the Redis FAQ): Redis uses a lot more memory when compiled for 64 bit target, especially if the dataset is composed of many small keys and values. Such a database will, for instance, consume 50 MB of RAM when compiled for the 32 bit target, and 80 MB for 64 bit! That's a big difference. You can run 32 bit Redis binaries in a 64 bit Linux and Mac OS X system without problems. For OS X just use make 32bit. For Linux instead, make sure you have libc6-dev-i386 installed, then use make 32bit if you are using the latest Git version. Instead for Redis <= 1.2.2 you have to edit the Makefile and replace "-arch i386" with "-m32". If your application is already able to perform application-level sharding, it is very advisable to run N instances of Redis 32bit against a big 64 bit Redis box (with more than 4GB of RAM) instead than a single 64 bit instance, as this is much more memory efficient. Would not the same recommendation also apply to a memcached cluster?

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  • Iptables state tracking

    - by complexgeek
    Hi there. I've just taken over administration of a fairly complex firewall ruleset for a firewall box running Fedora Core 12, and there's one thing about it that is puzzling me. When I run nmap on the gateway from outside the network, I see all the expected services, but also sunrpc on port 111. The INPUT chain has DEFAULT DROP set, and there is no rule allowing port 111. As best I can tell (watching the packet counters before/during/after the scan) it's being allowed by the rule: "-m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT" but I don't understand why a brand new TCP connection would be considered RELATED or ESTABLISHED. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. EDIT: Conntrack modules: nf_conntrack_netlink 14925 0 nfnetlink 3479 1 nf_conntrack_netlink nf_conntrack_irc 5206 1 nf_nat_irc nf_conntrack_proto_udplite 3138 0 nf_conntrack_h323 62110 1 nf_nat_h323 nf_conntrack_proto_dccp 6878 0 nf_conntrack_sip 16921 1 nf_nat_sip nf_conntrack_proto_sctp 11131 0 nf_conntrack_pptp 10673 1 nf_nat_pptp nf_conntrack_sane 5458 0 nf_conntrack_proto_gre 6574 1 nf_conntrack_pptp nf_conntrack_amanda 2796 1 nf_nat_amanda nf_conntrack_ftp 11741 1 nf_nat_ftp nf_conntrack_tftp 4665 1 nf_nat_tftp nf_conntrack_netbios_ns 1534 0 nf_conntrack_ipv6 18504 2 ipv6 279399 40 ip6t_REJECT,nf_conntrack_ipv6 INPUT chain on the filter table: -A INPUT -s 192.168.200.10/32 -p tcp -m tcp --dport 22 -m state --state NEW,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -s 127.0.0.0/8 -i lo -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p udp -m udp --sport 67:68 --dport 67:68 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -d 192.168.200.5/32 -i eth0 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -d 192.168.1.2/32 -i eth0 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -d {public_ip}/32 -i ppp0 -p tcp -m multiport --dports 22,80,443 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -d {public_ip}/32 -i ppp0 -p tcp -m multiport --sports 22,25,80,443 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -d {public_ip}/32 -i ppp0 -p udp -m udp --dport 1194 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -d {public_ip}/32 -i ppp0 -p udp -m udp --sport 1194 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -d {public_ip}/32 -i ppp0 -p udp -m multiport --sports 53,123 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -d {public_ip}/32 -i ppp0 -p icmp -m icmp --icmp-type 8 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -i eth0 -m state --state NEW -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -d {public_ip}/32 -m state --state NEW -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT eth0 is connected to the internal network, eth3 is connected to an ADSL modem in bridge mode, ppp0 is the WAN connection tunneled over eth3.

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  • Fedora 13 becomes unresponsive when too many applications running.

    - by user61766
    I am using Fedora 13 64bit on Dell Vostro full 4GB RAM system with default Gnome GUI. This is very annoying problem that I don't how to fix except by rebooting the whole PC. When I have too many applications running ( like browser windows), the system start acting sluggish. The fist symptoms appear in Eclipse IDE which becomes so terrible it just becomes frozen for sometime one whole minute after I try to edit something in the editor. Then Firefox seems like it has crashed. Google Chrome becomes very unresponsive as well. All GUI applications including File manager becomes unresponsive. When I check System Monitor, the CPU is still around 20% and memory is at 80% but the system seems getting fried up. This progressively becomes worse until I soft reboot it or if I dont do it evetually the whole system is fried, no response to any keyboard key or mouse and I have to hit the hardware turn off button. I regularly yum update the system but this makes no difference. Please don't tell not to run too many applications because I need those for my work. I thought Linux is well designed Operating System but I am very disappointed so far. Can some one here help ?

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  • Domain name is bringing up wrong site

    - by daniel0mullins
    I have a VPS that hosts several domains. I have set up Apache in the following manner: First VirtualHost /etc/apache2/sites-available/somedomain.com <VirtualHost somedomain.com:80> ServerName somedomain.com ServerAlias www.somedomain.com ... </VirtualHost> Second VirtualHost /etc/apache2/sites-available/someotherdomain.com <VirtualHost someotherdomain.com:80> ServerName someotherdomain.com ServerAlias www.someotherdomain.com ... </VirtualHost> Then I symlink the config files from sites-available to sites-enabled and all is well. I had a need to 'turn off' someotherdomain.com, so I removed the symlink to /etc/apache2/sites-available/someotherdomain.com from sites-enabled and the site no longer shows up... BUT typing someotherdomain.com into a web browser brings up somedomain.com!!! I need it to not resolve at all. Does somethiing need to be done in the VirtualHost to just automatically return a 500 or something along those lines. I really don't want people to reach one website from a different domain. Thanks! EDIT ports.conf looks like this NameVirtualHost *:80 Listen 80 <IfModule mod_ssl.c> NameVirtualHost *:443 Listen 443 </IfModule> <IfModule mod_gnutls.c> Listen 443 </IfModule>

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  • Would a USB hub work in reverse?

    - by Tim
    Imagine for a moment with a 4 port USB hub. Normally how this would work is the hub has one plug that goes to the computer, then 4 ports that you can plug in other things to (thumb drive, keyboard, mouse etc). I am wondering if I can use it in reverse. So I would have 1 keyboard going in to the hub, and then plug in male to male usb cables from the 4 ports to 4 different PCs, my aim is that when a key is pressed on the keyboard all 4 PCs will receive it as if the keyboard were plugged in to them. Does anyone know if this would work? And if not does anyone have any ideas how I could get the same effect? EDIT: So I am looking for more of a KVM switch type device rather than a USB hub. However all of the KVM switches I've found use some sort of mechanism to select which computer you'll be using. (some are physical switches / buttons, others do it via software "automatically" some how) However I need to have 1 keyboard hooked up to 2 computers and when I press a key on the keyboard I want the keypress to be sent to both computers simultaneously, not to one or the other. Does anyone know if KVMs with this feature exist?

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  • why does my dl380 G3 crank the fan up so high (and how do i stop it?)

    - by smoofra
    I've got a HP DL380 and after I leave it on for a while it decides it needs to run the fans at a much higher speed than it did before. It's really loud and annoying. Is there any way to manually control the fan speed? Or otherwise get it to stop doing that? Thanks. edit: I guess i should have made it clear that this is a bit of a jury-rigged situation. I know the ideal solution is to put the thing in a server room with nice cool air. Unfortunately, that isn't happening. This is the sort of problem that calls for a jury rigged solution like manually setting the fan speed and accepting the fact that it's going to run hot shutting down a CPU (can i do that?) spinning down the disks when they're not in use (is that possible?) solution: Install HP's system health monitoring daemon, hpasmd. I installed it to try to figure out what was going on, and just running it fixed the problem.

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  • Windows 7 constantly accessing hard drive [duplicate]

    - by Zohar
    Possible Duplicate: Tool which finds which process is causing the heavy hard drive activity? Did you notice that on Windows 7 (I use 64-bit) the hard drive LED is constantly blinking, which means that the OS is constantly wearing the hard drive by accessing it? It's something related to the system process, and it even occurs in safe mode, so I don't think it's a third party software problem. Has anyone experienced this problem as well, and is it a Windows problem, or caused by something else? Edit: My indexing service is reduced to indexing only the Start Menu. Even if it was set for the whole computer, it would eventually stop; that's not it. My friends also suffer from the same problem. Please answer my first question: have any of you have seen a Windows 7 machine whose hard drive LED is at rest? I'm also trying to track down the offending process using procmon and Resource Monitor, and it actually seems like a system process. It could also be svchost.exe, and I'm not sure which file they are accessing since I see a lot of activity which I can't make sense of. It's loading system DLLs, accessing registry keys, and other nonsense.

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  • 26 Days: Countdown to Oracle OpenWorld 2012

    - by Michael Snow
    Welcome to our countdown to Oracle OpenWorld! Oracle OpenWorld 2012 is just around the corner. In less than 26 days, San Francisco will be invaded by an expected 50,000 people from all over the world. Here on the Oracle WebCenter team, we’ve all been working to help make the experience a great one for all our WebCenter customers. For a sneak peak  – we’ll be spending this week giving you a teaser of what to look forward to if you are joining us in San Francisco from September 30th through October 4th. We have Oracle WebCenter sessions covering all topics imaginable. Take a look and use the tools we provide to build out your schedule in advance and reserve your seats in your favorite sessions.  That gives you plenty of time to plan for your week with us in San Francisco. If unfortunately, your boss denied your request to attend - there are still some ways that you can join in the experience virtually On-Demand. This year - we are expanding even more up North of Market Street and will be taking over Union Square as well. Check out this map of San Francisco to get a sense of how much of a footprint Oracle OpenWorld has grown to this year. With so much to see and so many sessions to learn from - its no wonder that people get excited. Add to that a good mix of fun and all of the possible WebCenter sessions you could attend - you won't want to sleep at all to take full advantage of such an opportunity. We'll also have our annual WebCenter Customer Appreciation reception - stay tuned this week for some more info on registration to make sure you'll be able to join us. If you've been following the America's Cup at all and believe in EXTREME PERFORMANCE you'll definitely want to take a look at this video from last year's OpenWorld Keynote. 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* 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:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Important OpenWorld Links:  Attendee / Presenters Toolkit Oracle Schedule Builder WebCenter Sessions (listed in the catalog under Fusion Middleware as "Portals, Sites, Content, and Collaboration" ) Oracle Music Festival - AMAZING Line up!!  Oracle Customer Appreciation Night -LOOK HERE!! Oracle OpenWorld LIVE On-Demand Here are all the WebCenter sessions broken down by day for your viewing pleasure. Monday, October 1st CON8885 - Simplify CRM Engagement with Contextual Collaboration Are your sales teams disconnected and disengaged? Do you want a tool for easily connecting expertise across your organization and providing visibility into the complete sales process? Do you want a way to enhance and retain organization knowledge? Oracle Social Network is the answer. Attend this session to learn how to make CRM easy, effective, and efficient for use across virtual sales teams. Also learn how Oracle Social Network can drive sales force collaboration with natural conversations throughout the sales cycle, promote sales team productivity through purposeful social networking without the noise, and build cross-team knowledge by integrating conversations with CRM and other business applications. CON8268 - Oracle WebCenter Strategy: Engaging Your Customers. Empowering Your Business Oracle WebCenter is a user engagement platform for social business, connecting people and information. Attend this session to learn about the Oracle WebCenter strategy, and understand where Oracle is taking the platform to help companies engage customers, empower employees, and enable partners. Business success starts with ensuring that everyone is engaged with the right people and the right information and can access what they need through the channel of their choice—Web, mobile, or social. Are you giving customers, employees, and partners the best-possible experience? Come learn how you can! ¶ HOL10208 - Add Social Capabilities to Your Enterprise Applications Oracle Social Network enables you to add real-time collaboration capabilities into your enterprise applications, so that conversations can happen directly within your business systems. In this hands-on lab, you will try out the Oracle Social Network product to collaborate with other attendees, using real-time conversations with document sharing capabilities. Next you will embed social capabilities into a sample Web-based enterprise application, using embedded UI components. Experts will also write simple REST-based integrations, using the Oracle Social Network API to programmatically create social interactions. ¶ CON8893 - Improve Employee Productivity with Intuitive and Social Work Environments Social technologies have already transformed the ways customers, employees, partners, and suppliers communicate and stay informed. Forward-thinking organizations today need technologies and infrastructures to help them advance to the next level and integrate social activities with business applications to deliver a user experience that simplifies business processes and enterprise application engagement. Attend this session to hear from an innovative Oracle Social Network customer and learn how you can improve productivity with intuitive and social work environments and empower your employees with innovative social tools to enable contextual access to content and dynamic personalization of solutions. ¶ CON8270 - Oracle WebCenter Content Strategy and Vision Oracle WebCenter provides a strategic content infrastructure for managing documents, images, e-mails, and rich media files. With a single repository, organizations can address any content use case, such as accounts payable, HR onboarding, document management, compliance, records management, digital asset management, or Website management. In this session, learn about future plans for how Oracle WebCenter will address new use cases as well as new integrations with Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Applications, leveraging your investments by making your users more productive and error-free. ¶ CON8269 - Oracle WebCenter Sites Strategy and Vision Oracle’s Web experience management solution, Oracle WebCenter Sites, enables organizations to use the online channel to drive customer acquisition and brand loyalty. It helps marketers and business users easily create and manage contextually relevant, social, interactive online experiences across multiple channels on a global scale. In this session, learn about future plans for how Oracle WebCenter Sites will provide you with the tools, capabilities, and integrations you need in order to continue to address your customers’ evolving requirements for engaging online experiences and keep moving your business forward. ¶ CON8896 - Living with SharePoint SharePoint is a popular platform, but it’s not always the best fit for Oracle customers. In this session, you’ll discover the technical and nontechnical limitations and pitfalls of SharePoint and learn about Oracle alternatives for collaboration, portals, enterprise and Web content management, social computing, and application integration. The presentation shows you how to integrate with SharePoint when business or IT requirements dictate and covers cloud-based (Office 365) and on-premises versions of SharePoint. Presented by a former Microsoft director of SharePoint product management and backed by independent customer research, this session will prepare you to answer the question “Why don’t we just use SharePoint for that?’ the next time it comes up in your organization. ¶ CON7843 - Content-Enabling Enterprise Processes with Oracle WebCenter Organizations today continually strive to automate business processes, reduce costs, and improve efficiency. Many business processes are content-intensive and unstructured, requiring ad hoc collaboration, and distributed in nature, requiring many approvals and generating huge volumes of paper. In this session, learn how Oracle and SYSTIME have partnered to help a customer content-enable its enterprise with Oracle WebCenter Content and Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g and integrate them with Oracle Applications. ¶ CON6114 - Tape Robotics’ Newest Superhero: Now Fueled by Oracle Software For small, midsize, and rapidly growing businesses that want the most energy-efficient, scalable storage infrastructure to meet their rapidly growing data demands, Oracle’s most recent addition to its award-winning tape portfolio leverages several pieces of Oracle software. With Oracle Linux, Oracle WebLogic, and Oracle Fusion Middleware tools, the library achieves a higher level of usability than previous products while offering customers a familiar interface for management, plus ease of use. This session examines the competitive advantages of the tape library and how Oracle software raises customer satisfaction. Learn how the combination of Oracle engineered systems, Oracle Secure Backup, and Oracle’s StorageTek tape libraries provide end-to-end coverage of your data. ¶ CON9437 - Mobile Access Management With more than five billion mobile devices on the planet and an increasing number of users using their own devices to access corporate data and applications, securely extending identity management to mobile devices has become a hot topic. This session focuses on how to extend your existing identity management infrastructure and policies to securely and seamlessly enable mobile user access. CON7815 - Customer Experience Online in Cloud: Oracle WebCenter Sites, Oracle ATG Apps, Oracle Exalogic Oracle WebCenter Sites and Oracle’s ATG product line together can provide a compelling marketing and e-commerce experience. When you couple them with the extreme performance of Oracle Exalogic, you’ll see unmatched scalability that provides you with a true cloud-based solution. In this session, you’ll learn how running Oracle WebCenter Sites and ATG applications on Oracle Exalogic delivers both a private and a public cloud experience. Find out what it takes to get these systems working together and delivering engaging Web experiences. Even if you aren’t considering Oracle Exalogic today, the rich Web experience of Oracle WebCenter, paired with the depth of the ATG product line, can provide your business full support, from merchandising through sale completion. ¶ CON8271 - Oracle WebCenter Portal Strategy and Vision To innovate and keep a competitive edge, organizations need to leverage the power of agile and responsive Web applications. Oracle WebCenter Portal enables you to do just that, by delivering intuitive user experiences for enterprise applications to drive innovation with composite applications and mashups. Attend this session to learn firsthand from customers how Oracle WebCenter Portal extends the value of existing enterprise applications, business processes, and content; delivers a superior business user experience; and maximizes limited IT resources. ¶ CON8880 - The Connected Customer Experience Begins with the Online Channel There’s a lot of talk these days about how to connect the customer journey across various touchpoints—from Websites and e-commerce to call centers and in-store—to provide experiences that are more relevant and engaging and ultimately gain competitive edge. Doing it all at once isn’t a realistic objective, so where do you start? Come to this session, and hear about three steps you can take that can help you begin your journey toward delivering the connected customer experience. You’ll hear how Oracle now has an integrated digital marketing platform for your corporate Website, your e-commerce site, your self-service portal, and your marketing and loyalty campaigns, and you’ll learn what you can do today to begin executing on your customer experience initiatives. ¶ GEN11451 - General Session: Building Mobile Applications with Oracle Cloud With the prevalence of smart mobile devices, companies are facing an increased demand to provide access to data and applications from new channels. However, developing applications for mobile devices poses some unique challenges. Come to this session to learn how Oracle addresses these challenges, offering a simpler way to develop and deploy cross-device mobile applications. See how Oracle Cloud enables you to access applications, data, and services from mobile channels in an easier way.  CON8272 - Oracle Social Network Strategy and Vision One key way of increasing employee productivity is by bringing people, processes, and information together—providing new social capabilities to enable business users to quickly correspond and collaborate on business activities. Oracle WebCenter provides a user engagement platform with social and collaborative technologies to empower business users to focus on their key business processes, applications, and content in the context of their role and process. Attend this session to hear how the latest social capabilities in Oracle Social Network are enabling organizations to transform themselves into social businesses.  --- Tuesday, October 2nd HOL10194 - Enterprise Content Management Simplified: Oracle WebCenter Content’s Next-Generation UI Regardless of the nature of your business, unstructured content underpins many of its daily functions. Whether you are working with traditional presentations, spreadsheets, or text documents—or even with digital assets such as images and multimedia files—your content needs to be accessible and manageable in convenient and intuitive ways to make working with the content easier. Additionally, you need the ability to easily share documents with coworkers to facilitate a collaborative working environment. Come to this session to see how Oracle WebCenter Content’s next-generation user interface helps modern knowledge workers easily manage personal and enterprise documents in a collaborative environment.¶ CON8877 - Develop a Mobile Strategy with Oracle WebCenter: Engage Customers, Employees, and Partners Mobile technology has gone from nice-to-have to a cornerstone of user engagement. Mobile access enables users to have information available at their fingertips, enabling them to take action the moment they make a decision, interact in the moment of convenience, and take advantage of new service offerings in their preferred channels. All your employees have your mobile applications in their pocket; now what are you going to do? It is a critical step for companies to think through what their employees, customers, and partners really need on their devices. Attend this session to see how Oracle WebCenter enables you to better engage your customers, employees, and partners by providing a unified experience across multiple channels. ¶ CON9447 - Enabling Access for Hundreds of Millions of Users How do you grow your business by identifying, authenticating, authorizing, and federating users on the Web, leveraging social identity and the open source OAuth protocol? How do you scale your access management solution to support hundreds of millions of users? With social identity support out of the box, Oracle’s access management solution is also benchmarked for 250-million-user deployment according to real-world customer scenarios. In this session, you will learn about the social identity capability and the 250-million-user benchmark testing of Oracle Access Manager and Oracle Adaptive Access Manager running on Oracle Exalogic and Oracle Exadata. ¶ HOL10207 - Build an Intranet Portal with Oracle WebCenter In this hands-on lab, you’ll work with Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle WebCenter Content to build out an enterprise portal that maximizes the productivity of teams and individual contributors. Using browser-based tools, you’ll manage site resources such as page styles, templates, and navigation. You’ll edit content stored in Oracle WebCenter Content directly from your portal. You’ll also experience the latest features that promote collaboration, social networking, and personal productivity. ¶ CON2906 - Get Proactive: Best Practices for Maintaining Oracle Fusion Middleware You chose Oracle Fusion Middleware products to help your organization deliver superior business results. Now learn how to take full advantage of your software with all the great tools, resources, and product updates you’re entitled to through Oracle Support. In this session, Oracle product experts provide proven best practices to help you work more efficiently, plan and prepare for upgrades and patching more effectively, and manage risk. Topics include configuration management tools, remote diagnostics, My Oracle Support Community, and My Oracle Support Lifecycle Advisors. New users and Oracle Fusion Middleware experts alike are guaranteed to leave with fresh ideas and practical, easy-to-implement next steps. ¶ CON8878 - Oracle WebCenter’s Cloud Strategy: From Social and Platform Services to Mashups Cloud computing represents a paradigm shift in how we build applications, automate processes, collaborate, and share and in how we secure our enterprise. Additionally, as you adopt cloud-based services in your organization, it’s likely that you will still have many critical on-premises applications running. With these mixed environments, multiple user interfaces, different security, and multiple datasources and content sources, how do you start evolving your strategy to account for these challenges? Oracle WebCenter offers a complete array of technologies enabling you to solve these challenges and prepare you for the cloud. Attend this session to learn how you can use Oracle WebCenter in the cloud as well as create on-premises and cloud application mash-ups. ¶ CON8901 - Optimize Enterprise Business Processes with Oracle WebCenter and Oracle BPM Do you have business processes that span multiple applications? Are you grappling with how to have visibility across these business processes; how to manage content that is associated with these processes; and, most importantly, how to model and optimize these business processes? Attend this session to hear how Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Business Process Management provide a unique set of integrated solutions to provide a composite application dashboard across these business processes and offer a solution for content-centric business processes. ¶ CON8883 - Deliver Engaging Interfaces to Oracle Applications with Oracle WebCenter Critical business processes live within enterprise applications, and application users need to manage and execute these processes as effectively as possible. Oracle provides a comprehensive user engagement platform to increase user productivity and optimize overall processes within Oracle Applications—Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle’s Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards product families—and third-party applications. Attend this session to learn how you can integrate these applications with Oracle WebCenter to deliver composite application dashboards to your end users—whether they are your customers, partners, or employees—for enhanced usability and Web 2.0–enabled enterprise portals.¶ Wednesday, October 3rd CON8895 - Future-Ready Intranets: How Aramark Re-engineered the Application Landscape There are essential techniques and technologies you can use to deliver employee portals that garner higher productivity, improve business efficiency, and increase user engagement. Attend this session to learn how you can leverage Oracle WebCenter Portal as a user engagement platform for bringing together business process management, enterprise content management, and business intelligence into a highly relevant and integrated experience. Hear how Aramark has leveraged Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle WebCenter Content to deliver a unified workspace providing simpler navigation and processing, consolidation of tools, easy access to information, integrated search, and single sign-on. ¶ CON8886 - Content Consolidation: Save Money, Increase Efficiency, and Eliminate Silos Organizations are looking for ways to save money and be more efficient. With content in many different places, it’s difficult to know where to look for a document and whether the document is the most current version. With Oracle WebCenter, content can be consolidated into one best-of-breed repository that is secure, scalable, and integrated with your business processes and applications. Users can find the content they need, where they need it, and ensure that it is the right content. This session covers content challenges that affect your business; content consolidation that can lead to savings in storage and administration costs and can lower risks; and how companies are realizing savings. ¶ CON8911 - Improve Online Experiences for Customers and Partners with Self-Service Portals Are you able to provide your customers and partners an easy-to-use online self-service experience? Are you processing high-volume transactions and struggling with call center bottlenecks or back-end systems that won’t integrate, causing order delays and customer frustration? Are you looking to target content such as product and service offerings to your end users? This session shares approaches to providing targeted delivery as well as strategies and best practices for transforming your business by providing an intuitive user experience for your customers and partners. ¶ CON6156 - Top 10 Ways to Integrate Oracle WebCenter Content This session covers 10 common ways to integrate Oracle WebCenter Content with other enterprise applications and middleware. It discusses out-of-the-box modules that provide expanded features in Oracle WebCenter Content—such as enterprise search, SOA, and BPEL—as well as developer tools you can use to create custom integrations. The presentation also gives guidance on which integration option may work best in your environment. ¶ HOL10207 - Build an Intranet Portal with Oracle WebCenter In this hands-on lab, you’ll work with Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle WebCenter Content to build out an enterprise portal that maximizes the productivity of teams and individual contributors. Using browser-based tools, you’ll manage site resources such as page styles, templates, and navigation. You’ll edit content stored in Oracle WebCenter Content directly from your portal. You’ll also experience the latest features that promote collaboration, social networking, and personal productivity. ¶ CON7817 - Migration to Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g Customers today continually strive to automate business processes, reduce costs, and improve efficiency. The accounts payable process—which is often distributed in nature, requires many approvals, and generates huge volumes of paper invoices—is automated by many customers. In this session, learn how Oracle and SYSTIME have partnered to help a customer migrate its existing Oracle Imaging and Process Management Release 7.6 to the latest Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g and integrate it with Oracle’s JD Edwards family of products. ¶ CON8910 - How to Engage Customers Across Web, Mobile, and Social Channels Whether on desktops at the office, on tablets at home, or on mobile phones when on the go, today’s customers are always connected. To engage today’s customers, you need to make the online customer experience connected and consistent across a host of devices and multiple channels, including Web, mobile, and social networks. Managing this multichannel environment can result in lots of headaches without the right tools. Attend this session to learn how Oracle WebCenter Sites solves the challenge of multichannel customer engagement. ¶ HOL10206 - Oracle WebCenter Sites 11g: Transforming the Content Contributor Experience Oracle WebCenter Sites 11g makes it easy for marketers and business users to contribute to and manage Websites with the new visual, contextual, and intuitive Web authoring interface. In this hands-on lab, you will create and manage content for a sports-themed Website, using many of the new and enhanced features of the 11g release. ¶ CON8900 - Building Next-Generation Portals: An Interactive Customer Panel Discussion Social and collaborative technologies have changed how people interact, learn, and collaborate, and providing a modern, social Web presence is imperative to remain competitive in today’s market. Can your business benefit from a more collaborative and interactive portal environment for employees, customers, and partners? Attend this session to hear from Oracle WebCenter Portal customers as they share their strategies and best practices for providing users with a modern experience that adapts to their needs and includes personalized access to content in context. The panel also addresses how customers have benefited from creating next-generation portals by migrating from older portal technologies to Oracle WebCenter Portal. ¶ CON9625 - Taking Control of Oracle WebCenter Security Organizations are increasingly looking to extend their Oracle WebCenter portal for social business, to serve external users and provide seamless access to the right information. In particular, many organizations are extending Oracle WebCenter in a business-to-business scenario requiring secure identification and authorization of business partners and their users. This session focuses on how customers are leveraging, securing, and providing access control to Oracle WebCenter portal and mobile solutions. You will learn best practices and hear real-world examples of how to provide flexible and granular access control for Oracle WebCenter deployments, using Oracle Platform Security Services and Oracle Access Management Suite product offerings. ¶ CON8891 - Extending Social into Enterprise Applications and Business Processes Oracle Social Network is an extensible social platform that enables contextual collaboration within enterprise applications and business processes, providing relevant data from across various enterprise systems in one place. Attend this session to see how an Oracle Social Network customer is integrating multiple applications—such as CRM, HCM, and business processes—into Oracle Social Network and Oracle WebCenter to enable individuals and teams to solve complex cross-organizational business problems more effectively by utilizing the social enterprise. ¶ Thursday, October 4th CON8899 - Becoming a Social Business: Stories from the Front Lines of Change What does it really mean to be a social business? How can you change our organization to embrace social approaches? What pitfalls do you need to avoid? In this lively panel discussion, customer and industry thought leaders in social business explore these topics and more as they share their stories of the good, the bad, and the ugly that can happen when embracing social methods and technologies to improve business success. Using moderated questions and open Q&A from the audience, the panel discusses vital topics such as the critical factors for success, the major issues to avoid, how to gain senior executive support for social efforts, how to handle undesired behavior, and how to measure business impact. It takes a thought-provoking look at becoming a social business from the inside. ¶ CON6851 - Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition to Create Vendor Portals Large manufacturers of grocery items routinely find themselves depending on the inventory management expertise of their wholesalers and distributors. Inventory costs can be managed more efficiently by the manufacturers if they have better insight into the inventory levels of items carried by their distributors. This creates a unique opportunity for distributors and wholesalers to leverage this knowledge into a revenue-generating subscription service. Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and Oracle WebCenter Portal play a key part in enabling creation of business-managed business intelligence portals for vendors. This session discusses one customer that implemented this by leveraging Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition. ¶ CON8879 - Provide a Personalized and Consistent Customer Experience in Your Websites and Portals Your customers engage with your company online in different ways throughout their journey—from prospecting by acquiring information on your corporate Website to transacting through self-service applications on your customer portal—and then the cycle begins again when they look for new products and services. Ensuring that the customer experience is consistent and personalized across online properties—from branding and content to interactions and transactions—can be a daunting task. Oracle WebCenter enables you to speak and interact with your customers with one voice across your Websites and portals by providing an integrated platform for delivery of self-service and engagement that unifies and personalizes the online experience. Learn more in this session. ¶ CON8898 - Land Mines, Potholes, and Dirt Roads: Navigating the Way to ECM Nirvana Ten years ago, people were predicting that by this time in history, we’d be some kind of utopian paperless society. As we all know, we’re not there yet, but are we getting closer? What is keeping companies from driving down the road to enterprise content management bliss? Most people understand that using ECM as a central platform enables organizations to expedite document-centric processes, but most business processes in organizations are still heavily paper-based. Many of these processes could be automated and improved with an ECM platform infrastructure. In this panel discussion, you’ll hear from Oracle WebCenter customers that have already solved some of these challenges as they share their strategies for success and roads to avoid along your journey. ¶ CON8908 - Oracle WebCenter Portal: Creating and Using Content Presenter Templates Oracle WebCenter Portal applications use task flows to display and integrate content stored in the Oracle WebCenter Content server. Among the most flexible task flows is Content Presenter, which renders various types of content on an Oracle WebCenter Portal page. Although Oracle WebCenter Portal comes with a set of predefined Content Presenter templates, developers can create their own templates for specific rendering needs. This session shows the lifecycle of developing Content Presenter task flows, including how to create, package, import, modify at runtime, and use such templates. In addition to simple examples with Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF) UI elements to render the content, it shows how to use other UI technologies, CSS files, and JavaScript libraries. ¶ CON8897 - Using Web Experience Management to Drive Online Marketing Success Every year, the online channel becomes more imperative for driving organizational top-line revenue, but for many companies, mastering how to best market their products and services in a fast-evolving online world with high customer expectations for personalized experiences can be a complex proposition. Come to this panel discussion, and hear directly from online marketers how they are succeeding today by using Web experience management to drive marketing success, using capabilities such as targeting and optimization, user-generated content, mobile site publishing, and site visitor personalization to deliver engaging online experiences. ¶ CON8892 - Oracle’s Journey to Social Business Social business is a revolution, one that is causing rapidly accelerating change in how companies and customers engage with one another and how employees work together. Oracle’s goal in becoming a social business is to create a socially connected organization in which working collaboratively across geographical locations, lines of business, and management chains is second nature, enabling innovative solutions to business challenges. We can achieve this by connecting the right people, finding the right content, communicating with the right people, collaborating at the right time, and building the right communities in the right context—all ready in the CLOUD. Attend this session to see how Oracle is transforming itself into a social business. ¶  ------------ If you've read all the way to the end here - we are REALLY looking forward to seeing you in San Francisco.

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  • Part 2&ndash;Load Testing In The Cloud

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

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  • Memory leak involving jQuery Ajax requests

    - by Eli Courtwright
    I have a webpage that's leaking memory in both IE8 and Firefox; the memory usage displayed in the Windows Process Explorer just keeps growing over time. The following page requests the "unplanned.json" url, which is a static file that never changes (though I do set my Cache-control HTTP header to no-cache to make sure that the Ajax request always goes through). When it gets the results, it clears out an HTML table, loops over the json array it got back from the server, and dynamically adds a row to an HTML table for each entry in the array. Then it waits 2 seconds and repeats this process. Here's the entire webpage: <html> <head> <title>Test Page</title> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3/jquery.min.js"></script> </head> <body> <script type="text/javascript"> function kickoff() { $.getJSON("unplanned.json", resetTable); } function resetTable(rows) { $("#content tbody").empty(); for(var i=0; i<rows.length; i++) { $("<tr>" + "<td>" + rows[i].mpe_name + "</td>" + "<td>" + rows[i].bin + "</td>" + "<td>" + rows[i].request_time + "</td>" + "<td>" + rows[i].filtered_delta + "</td>" + "<td>" + rows[i].failed_delta + "</td>" + "</tr>").appendTo("#content tbody"); } setTimeout(kickoff, 2000); } $(kickoff); </script> <table id="content" border="1" style="width:100% ; text-align:center"> <thead><tr> <th>MPE</th> <th>Bin</th> <th>When</th> <th>Filtered</th> <th>Failed</th> </tr></thead> <tbody></tbody> </table> </body> </html> If it helps, here's an example of the json I'm sending back (it's this exact array wuith thousands of entries instead of just one): [ { mpe_name: "DBOSS-995", request_time: "09/18/2009 11:51:06", bin: 4, filtered_delta: 1, failed_delta: 1 } ] EDIT: I've accepted Toran's extremely helpful answer, but I feel I should post some additional code, since his removefromdom jQuery plugin has some limitations: It only removes individual elements. So you can't give it a query like `$("#content tbody tr")` and expect it to remove all of the elements you've specified. Any element that you remove with it must have an `id` attribute. So if I want to remove my `tbody`, then I must assign an `id` to my `tbody` tag or else it will give an error. It removes the element itself and all of its descendants, so if you simply want to empty that element then you'll have to re-create it afterwards (or modify the plugin to empty instead of remove). So here's my page above modified to use Toran's plugin. For the sake of simplicity I didn't apply any of the general performance advice offered by Peter. Here's the page which now no longer memory leaks: <html> <head> <title>Test Page</title> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3/jquery.min.js"></script> </head> <body> <script type="text/javascript"> <!-- $.fn.removefromdom = function(s) { if (!this) return; var el = document.getElementById(this.attr("id")); if (!el) return; var bin = document.getElementById("IELeakGarbageBin"); //before deleting el, recursively delete all of its children. while (el.childNodes.length > 0) { if (!bin) { bin = document.createElement("DIV"); bin.id = "IELeakGarbageBin"; document.body.appendChild(bin); } bin.appendChild(el.childNodes[el.childNodes.length - 1]); bin.innerHTML = ""; } el.parentNode.removeChild(el); if (!bin) { bin = document.createElement("DIV"); bin.id = "IELeakGarbageBin"; document.body.appendChild(bin); } bin.appendChild(el); bin.innerHTML = ""; }; var resets = 0; function kickoff() { $.getJSON("unplanned.json", resetTable); } function resetTable(rows) { $("#content tbody").removefromdom(); $("#content").append('<tbody id="id_field_required"></tbody>'); for(var i=0; i<rows.length; i++) { $("#content tbody").append("<tr><td>" + rows[i].mpe_name + "</td>" + "<td>" + rows[i].bin + "</td>" + "<td>" + rows[i].request_time + "</td>" + "<td>" + rows[i].filtered_delta + "</td>" + "<td>" + rows[i].failed_delta + "</td></tr>"); } resets++; $("#message").html("Content set this many times: " + resets); setTimeout(kickoff, 2000); } $(kickoff); // --> </script> <div id="message" style="color:red"></div> <table id="content" border="1" style="width:100% ; text-align:center"> <thead><tr> <th>MPE</th> <th>Bin</th> <th>When</th> <th>Filtered</th> <th>Failed</th> </tr></thead> <tbody id="id_field_required"></tbody> </table> </body> </html> FURTHER EDIT: I'll leave my question unchanged, though it's worth noting that this memory leak has nothing to do with Ajax. In fact, the following code would memory leak just the same and be just as easily solved with Toran's removefromdom jQuery plugin: function resetTable() { $("#content tbody").empty(); for(var i=0; i<1000; i++) { $("#content tbody").append("<tr><td>" + "DBOSS-095" + "</td>" + "<td>" + 4 + "</td>" + "<td>" + "09/18/2009 11:51:06" + "</td>" + "<td>" + 1 + "</td>" + "<td>" + 1 + "</td></tr>"); } setTimeout(resetTable, 2000); } $(resetTable);

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  • WebLogic job scheduling

    - by XpiritO
    Hello, overflowers :) I'm trying to implement a WebLogic job scheduling example, to test my cluster capabilities of fail-over on scheduled tasks (to ensure that these tasks are executed on fail over scenario). With this in mind, I've been following this example and trying to configure everything accordingly. Here are the steps I've done so far: Configured a cluster with 1 admin server (AdminServer) and 2 managed instances (Noddy and Snoopy); Set up database tables (using Oracle XE): ACTIVE and WEBLOGIC_TIMERS; Set up data source to access DB and associated it to the scheduling tasks under "Settings for cluster" "Scheduling"; Implemented a job (TimerListener) and a servlet to initialize the job scheduling, as follows: . package timedexecution; import java.io.IOException; import java.io.PrintWriter; import java.io.Serializable; import java.text.SimpleDateFormat; import java.util.Date; import javax.naming.InitialContext; import javax.naming.NamingException; import javax.servlet.ServletException; import javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet; import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest; import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse; import commonj.timers.Timer; import commonj.timers.TimerListener; import commonj.timers.TimerManager; public class TimerServlet extends HttpServlet { private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L; protected static void logMessage(String message, PrintWriter out){ out.write("<p>"+ message +"</p>"); System.out.println(message); } @Override public void service(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws ServletException, IOException { PrintWriter out = response.getWriter(); // out.println("<html>"); out.println("<head><title>TimerServlet</title></head>"); // try { // logMessage("service() entering try block to intialize the timer from JNDI", out); // InitialContext ic = new InitialContext(); TimerManager jobScheduler = (TimerManager)ic.lookup("weblogic.JobScheduler"); // logMessage("jobScheduler reference " + jobScheduler, out); // jobScheduler.schedule(new ExampleTimerListener(), 0, 30*1000); // logMessage("Timer scheduled!", out); // //execute this job every 30 seconds logMessage("service() started the timer", out); // logMessage("Started the timer - status:", out); // } catch (NamingException ne) { String msg = ne.getMessage(); logMessage("Timer schedule failed!", out); logMessage(msg, out); } catch (Throwable t) { logMessage("service() error initializing timer manager with JNDI name weblogic.JobScheduler " + t,out); } // out.println("</body></html>"); out.close(); } private static class ExampleTimerListener implements Serializable, TimerListener { private static final long serialVersionUID = 8313912206357147939L; public void timerExpired(Timer timer) { SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat(); System.out.println( "timerExpired() called at " + sdf.format( new Date() ) ); } } } Then I executed the servlet to start the scheduling on the first managed instance (Noddy server), which returned as expected: (Servlet execution output) service() entering try block to intialize the timer from JNDI jobScheduler reference weblogic.scheduler.TimerServiceImpl@43b4c7 Timer scheduled! service() started the timer Started the timer - status: Which resulted in the creation of 2 rows in my DB tables: WEBLOGIC_TIMERS table state after servlet execution: "EDIT"; "TIMER_ID"; "LISTENER"; "START_TIME"; "INTERVAL"; "TIMER_MANAGER_NAME"; "DOMAIN_NAME"; "CLUSTER_NAME"; ""; "Noddy_1268653040156"; "[datatype]"; "1268653040156"; "30000"; "weblogic.JobScheduler"; "myCluster"; "Cluster" ACTIVE table state after servlet execution: "EDIT"; "SERVER"; "INSTANCE"; "DOMAINNAME"; "CLUSTERNAME"; "TIMEOUT"; ""; "service.SINGLETON_MASTER"; "6382071947583985002/Noddy"; "QRENcluster"; "Cluster"; "10.03.15" Although, the job is not executed as scheduled. It should print a message on the server's log output (Noddy.out file) with a timestamp, saying that the timer had expired. It doesn't. My log files state as follows: Admin server log (myCluster.log file): ####<15/Mar/2010 10H45m GMT> <Warning> <Cluster> <test-ad> <Noddy> <[STANDBY] ExecuteThread: '1' for queue: 'weblogic.kernel.Default (self-tuning)'> <<WLS Kernel>> <> <> <1268649925727> <BEA-000192> <No currently living server was found that could host TimerMaster. The server will retry in a few seconds.> Noddy server log (Noddy.out file): service() entering try block to intialize the timer from JNDI jobScheduler reference weblogic.scheduler.TimerServiceImpl@43b4c7 Timer scheduled! service() started the timer Started the timer - status: <15/Mar/2010 10H45m GMT> <Warning> <Cluster> <BEA-000192> <No currently living server was found that could host TimerMaster. The server will retry in a few seconds.> (Noddy.log file): ####<15/Mar/2010 11H24m GMT> <Info> <Common> <test-ad> <Noddy> <[ACTIVE] ExecuteThread: '0' for queue: 'weblogic.kernel.Default (self-tuning)'> <<WLS Kernel>> <> <> <1268652270128> <BEA-000628> <Created "1" resources for pool "TxDataSourceOracle", out of which "1" are available and "0" are unavailable.> ####<15/Mar/2010 11H37m GMT> <Info> <Cluster> <test-ad> <Noddy> <[ACTIVE] ExecuteThread: '0' for queue: 'weblogic.kernel.Default (self-tuning)'> <<anonymous>> <> <> <1268653040226> <BEA-000182> <Job Scheduler created a job with ID Noddy_1268653040156 for TimerListener with description timedexecution.TimerServlet$ExampleTimerListener@2ce79a> ####<15/Mar/2010 11H39m GMT> <Info> <JDBC> <test-ad> <Noddy> <[ACTIVE] ExecuteThread: '3' for queue: 'weblogic.kernel.Default (self-tuning)'> <<WLS Kernel>> <> <> <1268653166307> <BEA-001128> <Connection for pool "TxDataSourceOracle" closed.> Can anyone help me out discovering what's wrong with my configuration? Thanks in advance for your help!

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  • Generating moderately interesting images

    - by Williham Totland
    Abstract: Can you propose a mathematical-ish algorithm over a plane of pixels that will generate a moderately interesting image, preferably one that on the whole resembles something? The story thus far: Once upon a time I decided in an effort to reduce cycle waste on my (admittedly too) numerous computers, and set out to generate images in a moderately interesting fashion; using a PRNG and some clever math to create images that would, on the whole, resemble something. Or at least, that was the plan. As it turns out, clever math requires being a clever mathematician; this I am not. At some length I arrived at a method that preferred straight lines (as these are generally the components of which our world is made), perhaps too strongly. The result is mildly interesting; resembling, perhaps, city grids as such: Now for the question proper: Given the source code of this little program; can you improve upon it and propose a method that gives somewhat more interesting results? (e.g. not city grids, but perhaps faces, animals, geography, what have you) This is also meant as a sort of challenge; I suppose and as such I've set down some completely arbitrary and equally optional rules: The comments in the code says it all really. Suggestions and "solutions" should edit the algorithm itself, not the surrounding framework, except as for to fix errors that prevents the sample from compiling. The code should compile cleanly with a standard issue C compiler. (If the example provided doesn't, oops! Tell me, and I'll fix. :) The method should, though again, this is optional, not need to elicit help from your friendly neighborhood math library. Solutions should probably be deliverable by simply yanking out whatever is between the snip lines (the ones that say you should not edit above and below, respectively), with a statement to the effect of what you need to add to the preamble in particular. The code requires a C compiler and libpng to build; I'm not entirely confident that the MinGW compiler provides the necessities, but I would be surprised if it didn't. For Debian you'll want the libpng-dev package, and for Mac OS X you'll want the XCode tools.. The source code can be downloaded here. Warning: Massive code splurge incoming! // compile with gcc -o imggen -lpng imggen.c // optionally with -DITERATIONS=x, where x is an appropriate integer // If you're on a Mac or using MinGW, you may have to fiddle with the linker flags to find the library and includes. #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <png.h> #ifdef ITERATIONS #define REPEAT #endif // ITERATIONS // YOU MAY CHANGE THE FOLLOWING DEFINES #define WIDTH 320 #define HEIGHT 240 // YOU MAY REPLACE THE FOLLOWING DEFINES AS APPROPRIATE #define INK 16384 void writePNG (png_bytepp imageBuffer, png_uint_32 width, png_uint_32 height, int iteration) { char *fname; asprintf(&fname, "out.%d.png", iteration); FILE *fp = fopen(fname, "wb"); if (!fp) return; png_structp png_ptr = png_create_write_struct(PNG_LIBPNG_VER_STRING, NULL, NULL, NULL); png_infop info_ptr = png_create_info_struct(png_ptr); png_init_io(png_ptr, fp); png_set_filter(png_ptr, PNG_FILTER_TYPE_DEFAULT, PNG_FILTER_NONE); png_set_compression_level(png_ptr, Z_BEST_COMPRESSION); png_set_IHDR(png_ptr, info_ptr, width, height, 8, PNG_COLOR_TYPE_GRAY, PNG_INTERLACE_NONE, PNG_COMPRESSION_TYPE_DEFAULT, PNG_FILTER_TYPE_DEFAULT); png_set_rows(png_ptr, info_ptr, imageBuffer); png_set_invert_mono(png_ptr); /// YOU MAY COMMENT OUT THIS LINE png_write_png(png_ptr, info_ptr, PNG_TRANSFORM_IDENTITY, NULL); png_destroy_write_struct(&png_ptr, &info_ptr); fclose(fp); free(fname); } int main (int argc, const char * argv[]) { png_uint_32 height = HEIGHT, width = WIDTH; int iteration = 1; #ifdef REPEAT for (iteration = 1; iteration <= ITERATIONS; iteration++) { #endif // REPEAT png_bytepp imageBuffer = malloc(sizeof(png_bytep) * height); for (png_uint_32 i = 0; i < height; i++) { imageBuffer[i] = malloc(sizeof(png_byte) * width); for (png_uint_32 j = 0; j < width; j++) { imageBuffer[i][j] = 0; } } /// CUT ACROSS THE DASHED LINES /// ------------------------------------------- /// NO EDITING ABOVE THIS LINE; EXCEPT AS NOTED int ink = INK; int x = rand() % width, y = rand() % height; int xdir = (rand() % 2)?1:-1; int ydir = (rand() % 2)?1:-1; while (ink) { imageBuffer[y][x] = 255; --ink; xdir += (rand() % 2)?(1):(-1); ydir += (rand() % 2)?(1):(-1); if (ydir > 0) { ++y; } else if (ydir < 0) { --y; } if (xdir > 0) { ++x; } else if (xdir < 0) { --x; } if (x == -1 || y == -1 || x == width || y == height || x == y && x == 0) { x = rand() % width; y = rand() % height; xdir = (rand() % 2)?1:-1; ydir = (rand() % 2)?1:-1; } } /// NO EDITING BELOW THIS LINE /// ------------------------------------------- writePNG(imageBuffer, width, height, iteration); for (png_uint_32 i = 0; i < height; i++) { free(imageBuffer[i]); } free(imageBuffer); #ifdef REPEAT } #endif // REPEAT return 0; } Note: While this question doesn't strictly speaking seem "answerable" as such; I still believe that it can give rise to some manner of "right" answer. Maybe. Happy hunting.

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