Archive
How to monitor your Internet facing service globally – #Azure, #ApplicationInsights, #Citrix, #NetScaler, #EnvokeIT
Hi again all!
It’s been quite a long time since I wrote a blog post.. I’ve just been too busy working! 🙂
But this is a really cool capability that I think that many of you will like, how often do your company or service provider have a good way of monitoring availability, performance etc. from the public Internet? And if they do then most of the time the larger service providers will build a service and install their own probes on different geographical locations and then they charge quite a lot for this service, and every time you change your application the charge you again for modifying the scripts that the probes use etc.
What I’ve tried and now think is going to be great for both smaller and larger organisations is the Azure Application Insights service. It’s really great and can assist with just this, it’s a service that microsoft provide from their locations globally where you can test your apps in Azure or course but also any web site out there on the Internet. And it doesn’t stop there, you can also use the server installer to also provide metrics from your Windows IIS server up to Azure to get more detailed statistics about the web server itself and requests etc.
Just think about how much it would take for you to setup monitoring from APAC, Americas and Europe for your NetScaler environment.. that would not be done in 10 minutes if you talk to your standard service provider. It took me 10 minutes to setup this reporting to ensure that the NetScaler is available from different locations around the world:
And this is just a simple url ping test to ensure that we get a proper 200 OK response from our EnvokeIT Lab environment that my colleague Björn have setup and modified so nicely with the X1 StoreFront look & feel.
Of course you can make a more proper test than just a url ping test like in this case, the service supports multi-step tests and also content matching etc. It’s also very easy to create one application/service that then consists of multiple locations that you want to monitor, for instance if you’re using GSLB FQDNs as well as regional to ensure that you get the full picture.
More information about what can be done you can find on the Azure Application Insights  page. Read more…
Ten websites that teach coding and a bunch of other things – via @caleweissman
This is a great summary blog post with many good references to where you can start learning to code!
Seemingly every day there’s a new article or blog post imploring you to learn how to code. “Those who code have the power to transform their dreams into reality.” “Coding will help you keep [your job], or help you make a case for a raise.” “You should learn to program because it’s easy, it’s fun, it will increase your skill set, and… it will fundamentally change your perspective on the world.” What’s more, “If you want to start a technology company, you should learn to code.” New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s New Year’s resolution was to learn how to code. Douglas Rushkoff, who calls coding “the new literacy of the digital age,” wrote an entire book about it. And didn’t Marc Andreessen say that “software is eating the world?” As a result, companies from Codecademy to edx and many others have popped up to meet this rising demand.
As a person who’s grown up in the digital age, I have often heard the cry, “digital literacy or die.” Conventional wisdom – at least today – is that in the way you know how to read and write English, “you need to have some understanding of the code that builds the Web… It is fundamental to the way the world is organized and the way people think about things these days.” If you buy that then you’ll want to start now.
But where should you go? I’ve been dabbling in the black arts, although I am by no means a ninja coder, and am ready to report back. The courses below offer everything from HTML to Python and beyond. HTML and CSS are good, because they’re the basic building blocks of Web design, and in my opinion, Python is useful, because it’s the most universal in many respects. Others say Java is better to learn, because its so prominent on the Web. I would rebut that you can learn Java from Python. Potayto. Potahto.
In any case, each program below emphasizes different pedagogical techniques and  philosophies, and they are all mass market in the sense that anyone is welcome. No previous experience is necessary.
MIT Courseware Online
MIT has long been a pioneer of online courseware. One course is their Intro to Computer Science & Programming class, thought by many to be the best, most encompassing intro computing course offered. Taught by tenured MIT faculty, the online course is structured via taped lectures, written assignments, and self-assessment quizzes.
The course itself is quite rigorous as it was an intro course for MIT students. This isn’t a sort of online class you can do some parts and not the other.  It requires a certain amount of pre-existing math knowhow to be truly successful. The course description says it only requires high school algebra as a prerequisite but I don’t buy this. I remember being pretty stumped by the second assignment, and I passed AP Calc with flying colors. This doesn’t mean the math is terribly high-level, but that it probably requires a certain amount of mathematical aptitude beyond algebra unless you want to spend the entire course scouring forums for help. As with any MIT course, there is an expectation that you not only know how to do a function, but why that function is performed and from where it stemmed. After attempting to follow this courseware for two sessions, I was officially stumped and dropped it.
edX
MIT and Harvard partnered up to create edX. It is a conglomeration of all of their available open courseware, along with a new department for the two institutions to perform research about the future of online courses and new pedagogical technologies. For MIT courseware, you can watch the lectures anytime, read the assignments, and self-assess. EdX has you follow the course in real time and complete the assignments and exams to receive a physical certificate from the program. It currently offers numerous classes in more subjects than just coding and far beyond the purview of Computers Science….
Continue reading here!
//Richard
#Citrix #StoreFront Slowness, Join and Replication issue – check list!
Ok, I guess that you may have seen issue with StoreFront before… and it you have not then good for U!
But in the case that you have experience it here are a couple of things that you can do and hopefully it solves your issue with slow StoreFront console startup, server join issues or replication issues. Sometimes I’ve seen that the join, replication and slowness is ok and the process goes through. But then all of a sudden you get an error and the propagation fails… and this can be because of a timeout in the StoreFront process that you’ve initiated.
I already assume that you’ve checked the basic stuff.. that the servers can reach each other (ping server name and FQDN etc. and that there are no FW issues)….
You may have an issue because you/your server cannot reach the Internet, and some of the components of the product is signed with SSL certificates and StoreFront will try to perform a check whether the publishers certificate is ok or not. So if your servers are behind a proxy serevr that you usually configure in your browser to be able to connect from your companies internal network to the Internet then you should do the following.
1. Log on to your first StoreFront server and create a copy of the original aspnet.config file under C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727 (verify which framework version that your app is using in IIS and modify that appropriate aspnet.config file, more info about this change can also be found here and is for Web Interface but is also applicable to StoreFront)
2. Open Notepad as an Admin (if you have UAC of course enabled) and open the asp net.config file
It will have the content as described by the picture above, Â add this line to it:Â Â <generatePublisherEvidence enabled=”false”/>
MS to Release Emergency IE Patch on Monday – #Microsoft, #IE – via @appcompatguy
The patch will fix a vulnerability in Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8
Sun, January 13, 2013
IDG News Service — Microsoft will release a patch on Monday for older versions of its Internet Explorer browser, deviating from its normal repair schedule due to the seriousness of the problem.
The vulnerability, which is present in IE 6, 7 and 8, is a memory corruption issue. It can be exploited by an attacker via a drive-by download, a term for loading a website with attack code that delivers malware to a victim’s computer if the person merely visits the website.
Microsoft released a quick fix for the issue earlier this month, but did not have a more permanent patch ready when it released its monthly batch of patches last Tuesday. The company will occasionally release an emergency patch if the software vulnerability is considered a high risk.
“While we have still seen only a limited number of customers affected by the issue, the potential exists that more customers could be affected in the future,” wrote Dustin Childs, group manager for the company’s Trustworthy Computing Group, on a company blog on Sunday.
The patch, which will be released at 10 AM PST, will be distributed through Windows Update. Childs wrote users…
Continue reading here!
//Richard
The IT Melting Pot! 