We’ve had a few plug-ins on our test site and they seem to be working out. I’m planning on rolling these into our main site this weekend and monitoring for issues. If you see anything, please report them here or through the contact page.
Monthly Archives: January 2014
Accidental Blacklisting
This one was rather annoying, so I thought I’d share lessons learned. Yesterday morning, our web host provider had a number of servers accidentally added to BlackList 1. Not good, because it caused our outgoing email under the .com TLD to be blocked. This meant that all outgoing emails bounced. Fortunately, our backup .ca TLD domain is hosted elsewhere. We’ve switched over temporarily, and while annoying, it does show that unless a company has a backup for email, they can be shut down rapidly and with no notice. We are still waiting for resolution.
Automatic User Removal
Relating to our Anti-Spam policy, users who register using automatic means, or who appear to be fake in the judgment of our site administrators may be removed without notice. If you have problems with access and are a legitimate user, please contact us and we will manually create a user for you. Note that we will not automatically remove posts without first reviewing these based on our website terms of use policy.
Acceptable Web Site Use Policy
By using this website, you agree to the following terms:
- The contents of this website are property of Nexbridge Inc. When you post comments or pages to this website, the content becomes property of Nexbridge Inc.
- You will not post any material that have ownership limitations that prevent these above policies from being in force.
- You have the legal right and authorization to post any and all material you post on this site.
- You will not repost information from this website onto another website without the permission of an officer of the Nexbridge Inc. If you need permission, please contact us for permission.
- You will not post advertising, other material on this site for the purpose of selling products or services or enticing others to buy products and services, without the expressed written permission from an officer of the company.
- Spam is 100% unacceptable and in violation of CASL legislation in Canada. We have a zero tolerance for it. If we find that you are involved in spamming practices in any manner, we will remove your user and access with no notice.
- Threats, bullying, and/or hateful posts are 100% unacceptable and we have zero tolerance for it. If you make a comment that is in any way threatening or perceived to be threatening by the original poster, or another poster or commenter in the chain, or a specifically targeted entity or group, we will remove your user and access with no notice. In some severe cases, at our sole determination, we reserve the right to inform the appropriate authorities.
- We reserve the right to block your IP address, subnet, and/or domain as we see fit, with or without evidence, based entirely at our discretion. Any attempts at misusing our website may result in the removal of your user id and/or access without notice at any time.
Success Study: Massive Performance for Financial Switch Ported to NonStop
The Client’s Profile
Our client is an international corporation who has a mature and well adopted financial switch in the UNIX/Oracle space. They have over one hundred financial customers.
The Client’s Challenge
As Indestructibility and Continuous Availability requirements become more desirable, our client wanted to port their code to the HP NonStop™ platform. Their challenge was to have their system perform better than it has on other platforms. We were engaged to make recommendations on how to improve the code and to augment their porting effort.
Our Mandate
As part of achieving our client’s objectives, we were given the mandate to fine-tune their code, practices, SQL structures, and application management framework. Also, we were engaged to make recommendations on design changes for porting code to the NonStop architecture.
The Key Benefits Our Client Received
In order to help our customer, Nexbridge contributed in the following ways:
- Using our indestructible architecture constructs, we helped move their code to the NonStop TS/MP environment, with online code update capabilities.
- Migrated to SQL/MX 3.2.1 to support large tables and higher performance.
- Reduced the number of system transactions to match actual business transactions, thereby reducing transaction times and massively increasing capacity.
- Leveraging new technology available in the IP CLIM, we build the ability to preserve socket connections across failures.
- Revised their code to function at an unprecedented business transaction rate.
- Acted as guides for their technology plans.
- Conducted a benchmark to demonstrate the new speed and capabilities of their application and to enable the publication of their results.
End Conditions
Once our services were completed, the client had the fastest, reliable, hot-upgrade capable, and most cost effective financial switch available with over 6000 TPS performance levels. Their success is documented on the BPC Banking Technologies website. We are honoured to have played a part in this historic and ground-breaking project. We are also honoured to continue our association with this client.
For more information, about this and our other successes, please contact us.
WordPress 3.8.1 Schedule
Ok, I know. Why am I bothering to tell anyone? We’ve got WordPress 3.8.1. in UAT (that’s User Acceptance Testing, in case you don’t know – and you should know). It is scheduled to go live over the weekend when no one is looking. If you see any problems, please let me know.
With Flying Colours!
I am so pleased to have just done an Indestructibility Assessment for the Richmond Hill Chamber of Commerce, who passed with flying colours. It is actually rare that organizations are so well prepared. Some of the things they did right:
- Weathered the recent Ice Storm very nicely. Their operations barely noticed it.
- Have sound backup plans for loss of technical and human resources.
- Replace their UPS batteries on a regular basis.
- Manage their systems very nicely.
- Understand and follow their data retention requirements.
- Plus lots more…
As a member of the Chamber, I am very happy that we are so well represented and glad to be associated with them.
Installing Plug-ins under ECLIPSE Juno and Java 1.7
Well, we hoped this one would go away, but even with the latest (JDK 1.7.0_51 as of today), the problem we saw with Indigo and Java 1.7 still exists. This problem results from the way Oracle modified Array.sort() in a threading environment. Unfortunately, as of the day I posted this, the NSDEE 4.0 installation instructions did not include a discussion of how to deal with this problem. You will find a discussion of what the ECLIPSE contributors have done relating to this problem here: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=317785.
The problem was further diagnosed as being: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=297805 with regards to Mirror Ranking.
So far, we have found two temporary solutions:
- For ECLIPSE 3.6.x to 4.2.2 modify the
config.inifile found in the ECLIPSE configuration directory (eclipse/configuration/config.ini) and add the following parameter:-Djava.util.Arrays.useLegacyMergeSort=true
- Run ECLIPSE 3.6.x to 4.2.2 using the Java 6 JRE/JDK.
Revisions 6_20 upward are acceptable to ECLIPSE. You can still build
with the Java 7 JDK by configuring your compilers internally to
ECLIPSE through Window/Preference.
This is of particular importance to NSDEE 2.x, NSDEE 3.x, and NSDEE 4.x users that have a large number of dependencies to ECLIPSE CDT components installed in a combination of remote update sites and local archives.
The problem has been either not been resolved for ECLIPSE 3.7.1 and above or was reintroduced. See the Indigo post for the original support note.
WordPress: So Where are We Now?
It’s been four days since the deployment and we’ve been live for two. So how are things? Not too bad. We’re having problems with analytics and spiders finding us, but that’s expected. Changing DNS makes spiders pretty angry at the best of times. I’m just glad that Shelob isn’t after me – it’s not like I have an Elven Sword or Starlight.
Right now, things are reasonably stable. No reports of problems have come my way and backups are being taken without problems. I can take the backup and Git can tell me what changed between versions – a big plus if you have to manage content as a database. Although the ECLIPSE compare engine takes a long time even on an i7 because the MySQL snapshot is so massive. Git compare tools might be better here.
Our one annoyance? Spambots. Yes, they caught up with us moments after the DNS switch happened. Fortunately, we are able to block posts. We have a large number of fake users that I have already deleted – hopefully I did not remove anyone real. Don’t worry, our editors won’t blindly delete users with posts so even if we accidentally delete a real user, the posts will be kept (or at least reviewed first for spam). We’re researching how to prevent the initial registration, but that’s a harder problem than catching actual spam posts.
More tomorrow on a really cool idea one of my sons had for learning about disaster management training.
WordPress Deployment: Here is What We Did
It was a dark and stormy night…
The adventure started by building a local copy of WordPress using basically MAMP (Mac, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) although I configured each on its own rather than using the MAMP product. No real differences there. DNS on a Mac is a bit of a gotcha because it sometimes does not like localhost vs. 127.0.0.1 if the server is not itself a DNS host, but that’s a different problem. The Apache instance had to be on a different port, so at least our URLs were very apparent. This turned out to be a good thing.
We then migrated whatever content we wanted from the old website. Forget Import. It doesn’t do what you’ll want. Probably never. At this point, some of the plug-ins worked, some didn’t. Anything with email was DOA because we are inside our firewall. No problem, we expected that.
So now the fun bits. There is no “deploy” button. FrontPage had one. DreamWeaver has one. Most things do. WordPress? Not so much. Sure, FTP worked to move the PHP code and ECLIPSE update sites. But there was more…
To move the content, we had to take a copy of the database. Oh, there’s nothing like TMF online dumps mind you; dump to text via mysqldump because WordPress requires MySQL. (Yes, that’s in red because of all the blood and pain). Our web host provider then used one of their magic scripts to go through the text image of the database and change all the URLs. Are you afraid yet? They then created our database using that script. This was early last Friday.
Once that was done, we had to check everything. PayPal had to be used once or errors were displayed to the user. That’s gone now. The Contact plug-in had to be disabled and enabled. The Captcha plug-in had a security problem in its internal directory that we had to set/reset and now it’s happy too. Not bad but very manual.
48 hours later, the DNS caches all flushed and the new site is visible to one and all. We’re breathing a little easier. But only a little. When we make content changes, instead of pushing them up to the host, we have to make in-place changed and then take a backup – that or we lose comments and posts. I can force an on demand backup any time I want (there are plug-ins like BackWPup to do that) There’s still effective way to push wholesale changes from development to production. So what’s the plan?
Well, we’re talking to people. WordPress hasn’t quite figured out this discipline yet; that or they are letting the community handle it. They do not have an official position on deployment. Yet. I know a blogger who is getting comments out there. You might know him. There are plug-ins being built that are starting to take this stuff into account. They aren’t free, and if I’m going to pay for something, it better be rock solid – you know, like we expect in the NonStop community. Maybe it is an opportunity for one of us to do something about it.