PC Quest Nov 2007

In this Issue

2 A CYBERMEDIA PublicationPCQUEST N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 7

November 2007

C O V E R S T O R Y

Strategies for Healthy WANs62

Discussions and Support @http://forums.pcquest.com

[email protected] for magazine related [email protected] for CD related queries

Cover design: Venkatesulu V Reddy

The load on enterprise WAN links is gradually increas-

ing as more applications are getting added to them.

With more load comes more management headaches,

performance issues, security woes, etc. We look at these

key pain points and at what WAN managers can do to

alleviate them.

T E C H N O L O G Y

Want to know about the hottest wireless technologies,

how they work, and where all they’re being used? In

this article, we’ll update you on what’s happening in

all the hot wireless technologies, along with a few

interesting uses that they’re being put to.

30

Wireless: The Story So Far

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88

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96

H A N D S O N

110

E X T R A E D G EMicrosoft BizTalk RFID

The Ultimate Boot CD

Masking with Corel Photo-Paint

Optimize Your Virtual Machines

Spam Busting in Windows Vista

Add More Fire to Your Firefox

HTTP Fingerprinting Simplified

Linux Online Aware Taskbar

Add Liveliness to Web Pages with

Photoshop CS3

Using Explorer as Shell

D E V E L O P E R

Implementing Ajax with ZK

Dynamic Data Controls in ASP.NET Futures

Efficient Unit-testing in Java with AgitarOne

Block Offensive Language from Your Site

Query Style Programming with Orcas

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136

D O I T Y O U R S E L FRunning Linpack on Windows Compute

Cluster

content-nov'07_final.qxp 10/24/2007 4:00 PM Page 4


In this Issue November 2007

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51

54

59

Bank on IT to Keep YourMoney Safe

V E R T I C A L F O C U S

Banking and financial services industry has been

at the forefront in adopting IT. Let’s identify issues

they face after having used IT, and what’s the way

forward. We bring inputs from CIOs of leading

banks and find out how they’re coping up with

new challenges.

14

76How to Keep Your Apps Healthy

E N T E R P R I S E S O L U T I O N S

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MojoPac Desktop Virtualization Software

Gnome 2.20

NetOP Remote Control 9.0

Extreme Networks Summit X250e-24P HP

ProCurve LAN-Edge Switches

Acer TravelMate 6292 Notebook

Asus W5Fe Notebook

Lenovo ThinkPad T61p Notebook

Dell Inspiron 1720 Notebook

Connoi FL91 Notebook

Kingston HyperX DDR3 RAM

PurpleNova Pro

Buffalo TeraStation Live NAS

Asus P5K3 Deluxe Motherboard

Gigabyte P35-DQ6 Motherboard

ECS NF650iSLIT-A Motherboard

Books

R E V I E W S

Remote Application Streaming

Virtualization in Windows Server 2008

IIS 7: A Modular Approach

Linux Rescue Box

Keep an Eye on Your Code

Host Intrusion Detection with OSSEC

E N T E R P R I S E I M P L E M E N T A T I O N

PCQ Xtreme DVD(Dual layer 8.5 GB)includes Adobe FrameMaker8, Hot LinuxISOs: Linbox, Mandriva and Ubuntu Stu-dio, and top 5 games in Gaming Zone

PCQ Professional CDGet Free Health Checkup for Your Appswith 6 tools, 5 tools to develop active weband desktop apps, 13 Top Utilities, andWS_FTP home edition guide

E-m

ail: cdrompcquest@

cybermedia.co.in. Produced by CyberMedia Labs. Replicated in India by Softalk Technologies

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November 2007

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cybermedia.co.in. Produced by CyberMedia Labs. Replicated in India by Softalk Technologie

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November 2007

P C QP r o f e s s i o n a l

Developers’cornerDevelopers’corner

Home Edition

WS_FTP

Four exciting Microsoft releases

� Media Center Development Kit

� .NET 3.0 Framework

� Expression Web

� Expression Blend

Plus, get ZKoss 3.0 RC,

an Ajax framework

Ensure the best of health for your critical apps by closely monitoring their performance using this healthy bunch of 6 tools

Free Health Checkup for Your Apps

Free Health Checkup for Your Apps

UtilitiesUtilities

� Application Monitor 1

� Application Manager 1

� OpenBAM

Publish websites,

blogs, and podcasts

with ease

� Startup Application Manager

� ManageEngine 7

� StartWatch

13 Top13 Top

PCQuest Power Pack

T R E N D S

OOXML or ODF: Which One Will Survive? 38

You could implement the best application in the world,

but if it is not tuned to users’ requirements, it’s bound to

fail. The story will identify critical issues that affect app

performance, tools for monitoring and managing the

various apps, and their implementation

content-nov'07_final.qxp 10/24/2007 4:00 PM Page 6


What would you do if you caught

an employee chatting with

friends on an instant messen-

ger? You’ll block it because it’s against com-

pany policy, chokes Internet bandwidth,

and wastes productive time. However, next

time, you’ll find another employee using

something else to interact with others, say

Orkut or blogging.You’ll block that also

only to find them using some other mecha-

nism to communicate, maybe a new P2P

application.

All these events don’t happen

overnight, as new social networking tech-

nologies take time to develop. But while

they develop, many other interesting things

also happen in the background.While IT

managers were busy banning Yahoo! Or

MSN Instant Messengers, somebody, some-

where was busy adding IM capabilities to a

Mail server for the same IT manager. Later,

the same IT manager who was blocking

IMs ends up deploying that mail server for

the enterprise for official use.

This is not a new trend. In fact, many

technologies we see being used in enter-

prises today were at one point of time criti-

cized or banned from use. I’m not saying

that organizations are following the wrong

practice. by banning such social network-

ing technologies.After all, such social net-

working technologies do cause disruption.

What’s important to realize here is that

many consumer driven technologies have

entered the enterprise world this way, and

revolutionized the face of IT; and more will

continue doing so in the future. The one

that’s hot off the platter today are social net-

working technologies, also called Web 2.0.

Most organizations today end up block-

ing Orkut or YouTube, the torch bearers of

Web 2.0 technologies, as they eat up pro-

ductivity and network bandwidth. But a lot

of enterprise software vendors have taken

queue from the concepts behind these sites

and introduced similar features within

their own products.

Take the latest versions of any collabo-

ration or messaging suite from any vendor

worth its name today, and you’ll find it to be

filled with Web 2.0 technologies.

Many other trends are also in the mak-

ing, which just might make it big. For a long

time, enterprises have been banning USB

drives from being used in the company due

to security reasons. But what if the same

USB drive could carry the entire desktop of

a user? This way, users could be more pro-

ductive on the move, without having to

carry laptops. That’s a trend more com-

monly known as desktop virtualization.

Likewise, most organizations block P2P

software, but today there are companies

busy creating new avatars of the same

‘menace’, which will be very beneficial for

organizations. How about file sharing or

web site hosting using a P2P software from

a PC, or downloading a new patch on one

machine and distributing it across?

So there are two sides to everything,

and we should also see the better side and

appreciate this spirit of innovation! �

Anil Chopra, Editor

Leading Edge

Editor-in-Chief: Shyam MalhotraChief Editor: Prasanto K Roy

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The Spirit of Innovation

editorial_Nov'07_final.qxp 10/24/2007 7:17 PM Page 6


During the past few months a new soft-

ware robot was in news, which could under-

stand jokes. Developed at the University of

Cincinnati, this 'bot' is a small example of so-

ciable computing. Its researchers say that

bots like this one can bring a sense of humor

to physical robots like Honda's ASIMO,

which can act as human companions.

This genre of robots are known as ‘Affec-

tive Systems’, but you’ll be surpirsed to know

that they have been around for decades.

These systens can recognize and respond to

human voice and display emotions such as

happiness, anger, etc. Similar to this was

Philips iCat, which was once the most talked

about commercial smart companion. Unfor-

tunately, it met with limited success, but it

could generate many facial expressions and

recognize objects and faces with a camera

installed on its head.

The best commercial robot I have ever

seen was Sony's AIBO. It could do all sorts of

things from checking email, obeying the

owner’s instructions to even playing football.

Sadly there weren’t many takers for it, and

Sony suffered huge losses.As a result, it went

out of production. Since then we haven’t

seen any appealing commercial AI robots.

Another robot considered to be emotion-

ally intelligent was developed at MIT some-

time back—the sociable humanoid known

as Kismet. For running it required 15 net-

worked computers, out of which nine ma-

chines were used to control its vision

processing, eyes, neck, etc. It was however

able to figure out human emotions and re-

quired a caretaker to learn new things.

As I was about to write this, I saw an-

other piece of news that said that in the fu-

ture, marriages between humans and robots

(androids) would also be possible and AI

would be used to ensure they both under-

stand each other. Not much information

about this is available and whether re-

searchers have done anything more practical

on this or not is still a matter of speculation.

The worst part is that researchers themselves

don’t understand why a human would like to

do something like this.Well, I would like to

ask them why are they wasting time on this

research if they don’t know what it’s for. I

mean they could spend all their precious re-

sources in solving some of the real problems

in the world.

God knows what future is going to shape

up to be, but something like this at this mo-

ment definitely seems odd, especially when

even a decent usable commercial AI robot

seems far away from reality. It’s been long

said that robots will be able to learn emo-

tions from humans, both right and wrong.As

this Emotional Intelligence evolves further,

robots could even learn to fake their emo-

tions and things could possibly go on as far

you can stretch your imagination.All said

and done, most of this area remains in re-

search, so it seems like it’ll gonna be a while

before smart companion becomes a reality.

Lastly, our Technology expert, Sanjay

Majumder, has moved on within the organi-

zation. I wish him all the best for future.

We’re gonna miss you Sanju! �

This Issue

AI and EI: Have they Finally Arrived?

Swapnil AroraIssue Editor for this month

BANGALOREGM - Sales (South): HS Shenoy

Asstt Manager (Sales): Bhagya Raj,

Rupesh Kumar

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Support: Guruprasad S

205, 2nd Floor, # 73, Shree Complex,

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editorial_nov'07_final.qxp 10/24/2007 7:29 PM Page 8

PCQUEST N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 710 A CYBERMEDIA Publication

II ttrriieedd ttoo ssttaarrtt wweebbmmiinn,, bbuuttccoouulldd nnoott iinn PPCCQQ LLiinnuuxx 22000077.. II bbee--lliieevvee iitt iiss nnoott iinncclluuddeedd iinn tthhee DDeesskk--ttoopp ooppttiioonn.. SSoo,, II ddoowwnnllooaaddeedd iittffrroomm wweebbmmiinn aanndd iinnssttaalllleedd iitt,, bbuuttssttiillll ccoouulldd nnoott ssttaarrtt iitt.. II sseeaarrcchheedd

PPCCQQ22kk77 ffoorruumm bbuutt ddiidd nnoott ffiinndd aannyyppoosstt oonn tthhiiss ttooppiicc

bbhhiiddee__vviijjuu oonn PPCCQQffoorruummssPPCCQQuueesstt:: Login as ‘root’ and run‘/etc/webmin/start’, this will startwebmin manually. Now, open a

browser and go to https://local-host:10000. Here, you should beable to see the webmin console.By default administration loginname of webmin is ‘root’ and password is your current root password.

II aamm iinn nneeeedd ooff aa ggaatteewwaayy lleevveell ssoolluuttiioonn ffoorr mmoonniittoorriinngg

oouuttggooiinngg iinnffoorrmmaattiioonn lleeaakkaaggeeddeetteeccttiioonn aanndd eemmaaiill mmoonniittoorriinnggppuurrppoosseess.. IIss iitt ppoossssiibbllee ttoo hhoollddoouuttggooiinngg eemmaaiillss tteemmppoorraarriillyy aannddhhaavvee tthheemm rreevviieewweedd bbyy aannaaddmmiinniissttrraattoorr bbeeffoorree ddeelliivveerryy??PPlleeaassee ssuuggggeesstt wwhhaatt sshhoouulldd II ddoo??

BB..NN JJaammeessPPCCQQuueesstt:: Information leakage pre-vention is a growing concern forall enterprises as conventionalUTMs and firewalls don’t solvethis problem. If you are looking fora software level solution, then lookat something like WebSense Con-tent Protection Suite. It lets youprotect data with policy level con-trols, and monitor data traveling inand out of the enterprise. Another

MESSAGE BOARDW H A T Y O U H A V E T O S A Y

I have been a PCQuest reader for the last 10 years. Itis with great interest that I read the VerticalFocus–Education in your October 2007 issue, particu-larly the part on ‘Exams via Linux in Kerala’. I havealso implemented a similar solution with a few morefeatures, using Apache, MySQL, and PHP for aMaritime academy in Goa. Using its database, theexaminer can immediately get results in variousforms—general marklist, detailed general marklistwhere a student’s marks in each topic are shown along

with the answer sheet. This database also maintains details ofeach student and allows you to edit them. jjddssggooaa oonn PPCCQQffoorruumm

I work with the branch of a big group. Since, we’ve have juststarted, our LAN setup acts as a work group under the main

group. We have a separate Internet broadband connection. The ISP'srouter is connected with a switch and then broadcasted to all users.We have an application server which runs our main applications,with server 2005 at backend. Now, I want to add a Web module to myapplication which will communicate with sqldatabase for retriev-ing and storing data. I have registered for a public IP from my ISP toconfigure my application server. I have purchased a hardware fire-wall (hclinfowall ) and want to install it, so that Web server could ac-cess only my sql database. How and where should I install it?

RReesshhjjkkrruusshh oonn PPCCQQffoorruummssPPCCQQuueesstt:: As you alreadyhave a firewall, you just haveto give a local IP to both yourWeb and SQL servers andmake them talk to eachother. Give the Public IP tothe Firewall and do port for-warding for port 80 to the local IP of the Web server, as shown in diagram.

Exams Via Linux in Kerala

msg board_final.qxp 10/24/2007 2:32 PM Page 13


IT has extended the business of banking toevery conceivable channel be it Internet, ATMs,mobiles and now even trains! Soon you wouldbe spared the pain of safekeeping multiple PINsand passwords through Biometrics. All thiscomes with its own set of challenges. Read on tofind out about those challenges, and how banksare finding innovative ways to resolve themAdeesh Sharma, Vishnu Anand and Jasmine Desai

it in vertical-bank_final.qxp 10/23/2007 10:35 PM Page 1


vertical ff ccuuss||BBaannkkiinngg

Given the frenetic pace of life, we’re all hard-pressed for time and energy to take care ofour critical tasks. And most of these in-

evitably require transacting money in one form or theother. A growing economy and the associated perilsof inflation together ensure that banking and finan-cial transactions increase in volumes with each pass-ing day. Just do a quick rehash of where you dependon banks to fulfill daily needs and you’ll know. Cashwithdrawals or deposits, utility bills (electricity, mo-biles, landlines), corporation taxes, income-tax, ad-vance tax, transfer of funds across accounts, fixeddeposits, share trading and so on. How do you taketime off your busy professional schedule to visit thebank and carry these out? Thankfully, it’s the otherway round. The trend among banks and financialservices companies has been to leverage IT to go totheir customers instead of the other way around.That’s why one can see banks introducing so manychannels for reaching out to their customers, likephone banking, SMS banking, online banking,ATMs, credit cards, debit cards and so on.

This sounds really impressive because bankshave to use IT extensively to make it happen. But, itcomes with its own set of challenges, which the CIOsof banks have to cope up with. One key concern is en-suring security of all these channels. More channelsmeans more number of ports opening up. Plus, thesecurity of transactions through these channels alsohas to be ensured. The other key challenge is integra-tion of various applications and their data. Every banktoday is trying to offer a host of services to customers.So apart from bank accounts, a bank today also offersloans, investment options, credit cards, etc. There arehigh chances that some of the customers are com-mon across these applications. However, since theseapplications have grown separately, integrating themtogether to offer cross sell opportunities is a majorchallenge. It’s a real challenge in front of banks to uti-lize information generated through one applicationfor servicing the same customer for another applica-tion. Simply count the number of times you get callsfrom the same bank, each time trying to sell someproduct/service or the other but completely oblivi-ous of the fact that you might already be their exist-ing customer and therefore would expect the callerto have done his homework properly and not ��



bother you for basic information such as address,email, age, etc.

Sadly, this is seldom the case and more often thannot you have to bear unwarranted calls from one bankor the other. So, clearly banks have a challenge here.To integrate data across different banking applica-tions so that agents manning various bank channelsknow before hand whether a customer they’re callingis already a customer or not.

Another challenge before banks is to tap the vastmarket of rural customers. In fact, this is one area thatremains neglected because of inadequate civic andtelecom infrastructure. May be it is time for banks togo beyond traditional solutions and look at some ofinnovative ones. One such alternative is the use bio-metric technologies in offering banking services tofar-flung areas. In this story we explore the solutionsto all these challenges and see what Indian bankshave already done to alleviate those.

WWhheerree IITT ccoommeess ttoo tthhee rreessccuuee For a start, banks need to have centralized infrastruc-ture not only for their branches but also for the differ-ent channels. This would ensure common access tocustomer information for users across different chan-nels. The same pool of information could be used tosolicit new products and services to old and new cus-tomers alike and at the same time provide an efficientmanagement information system (MIS) to the salesteams to generate leads from.

One strong solution to such integration chal-lenges can be SOA or Services Oriented Architec-ture. It could help banks ensure that their variousapplications are able to connect with each other with-out writing any proprietary code, or tampering withthe individual databases. There’s tremendous scopefor banks to utilize SOA for this job. In fact, it couldeven be used to integrate their banking applicationswith the various communication channels.

On the security front, there are several solutions be-ing worked out by banks. One of course would be todeploy a complete information security solution that isable to secure all applications and channels of entry.As an example of how security across various channelscan be enhanced, let’s take a quick peek at how SMSbanking can be used to make and receive paymentsfrom third parties such as merchant establishments.

A buyer sends a message for buying and the bankin turn sends a message confirming the purchase toboth the merchant as well as the buyer. Debit cardnumber is the key field which is used for the authen-ticity of the customer. Security for transactions tak-ing place through this channel is ensured in twostages. First your mobile number is authenticated bythe bank through the use of authentication keys.Next, a customer enters a secret Mobile PersonalIdentification Number (MPIN). This needs to beagain authenticated by the bank. As an enhanced se-curity measure, access is denied after three invalid login attempts.


HSBC introduced the first ATM in India in 1987.ICICI, UTI, HDFC and IDBI together count for morethan 50% of the total ATMs in India. But SBI pipsthem all in reaching out to the remotest of customers,with ATM machines in the smallest of towns andcities. After SBI, The Corporation Bank has the secondlargest network of ATMs amongst nationalized banks.Most of the banks are entering into tie-ups with otherbanks to fast-forward their ATM deployment. For anominal fee, which depends on the scheme that abank offers and the facilities you choose, customerscan enjoy the same benefits as they do from theirbank’s own ATM. All information and transactions are

routed among member institutions through a networkswitch. This switch transmits the information to thebank which has issued the card, which in turnapproves or declines the transaction request and noti-fies the switch. The decision of the card-issuing bankis then routed by the switch to the processor of theATM, which completes the transaction. The accountbalances of member banks are sent at the end of theday. It takes approximately Rs 10 lakhs to set up anATM center. Rs 12-14 lakhs per annum are needed forits maintenance. To keep the cost in equilibrium posi-tion, there should be around 250-300 transactions perday per ATM.

��

ATMs:A quick rewind


How would you rate the adoption of IT by your bank and

what according to you are the pain areas?

The problem related to IT adoption is two-fold. For one, we

have to face demands from suppliers and secondly, the staff

needs to get adjusted to the latest technology. A vendor can

only provide you with a solution, give you the connectivity

and links, but it is upto you to utilize it for business develop-

ment. The growth rate in banking is extremely high and IT

industry at times fails to deliver. For eg, nowadays we talk of

opening 50 branches in a single day. For that, we need hard-

ware and connectivity. IT industry due to physical and capaci-

ty constraints fails to provide connectivity in certain places.

When a rural branch is included in Core Banking System

(CBS) and if any of the connectivity links goes down, it

becomes a serious issue.

What steps have you taken to ensure faster services to

customers?

Our processes have been re-engi-

neered so that services get priority

rather than the background

processes. For eg, we have adopt-

ed an application called Universal

Tailor which will dispose

cash payment from

the storage disk

itself, shortening

the time of

the original

process.

The signature of the customer is made available to the cashier

through technology. Customers can also open new accounts

with us through Internet and come to the bank just once to

sign documents.

How do you alleviate security concerns at your as well as

customer’s end?

We have a very elaborate system for security. However, one

cannot remain static on security. It always needs to be

upgraded. We regularly do “Penetration Test” wherein some

people from outside with our permission are allowed to test

the vulnerability of our system. In the datacenters, everyday a

report is generated and reviewed to check whether there was

an attempt to hack the system. To ensure identity of a cus-

tomer, the most common way is an ID and a password. We are

also adopting biometrics wherein through a thumb impres-

sion or colour of the eye the authenticity of the person is rec-

ognized. This would be especially useful in rural areas.

How do you plan to expand your reach in rural areas?

We are very keen on expanding in rural areas as more than 40

per cent of our business comes from there. Unfortunately, IT

has failed in providing connectivity in many remote areas.

There are business considerations involved while building

infrastructure in these remote areas. All branches have to be

brought on a common platform with similar technology. To

resolve connectivity issues we tied up with a radio link

provider to provide us connectivity through radio links.



A case for biometric authentication The banking sector has been very lousy in adoptingbiometrics for the mass consumer, as people used toperceive sharing details of their anatomies as analo-gous to criminal investigation. But with a lot ofthought being given to innovation throughout theBFS, the technology is finding many takers now.However, in rural areas, with literacy rates still belowacceptable levels, people have been pragmatic to-ward this technology. We believe anything thatmakes for a simpler interface and saves you from thehassles of maintaining mu`ltiple passwords or PINsis a welcome step. It is after all an automated tech-

nique for establishing identity through unique phys-iological or behavioral characteristics.

Finger scanning is still the most popular applicationof biometrics in automated teller machines. By plug-ging a portable scanning device into the back of theATM, any ATM machine can be enhanced to offer thisfunctionality. This machine in turn connects to thebank's server, which authenticates the visitor by com-paring with stored records. It’s an unequivocal way ofestablishing the identity of the person and one that can’tbe breached by intruders. And not just ATMs, biomet-rics can also be used to restrict access to sensitive areasin banks such as locker rooms and data centers. ��

K Asawa

DGM, IT - Bank of Baroda

We regularly do ‘Penetration Tests,’wherein people from outside are allowed

to test the vulnerability of our system“”


What makes a biometric trait stand apart is that itis as unique as the individual from whom it was cre-ated. So unlike a password or PIN, a biometric traitcannot be lost, stolen, or recreated. This makes theuse of biometrics a sure enough remedy to preventidentity theft, a problem that is mushrooming along-side databases of personal information. In fact, someof the channels for monetary transactions such ascredit cards are a very good candidate for applicationof biometrics on the consumer side. More so, as theyget smarter and develop capabilities to store moreand more personal details on an RFID chip. Apartfrom the account information and other personal de-tails, information pertaining to the biometric traits ofan individual can also be bolted inside. Technologyexperts aver that a digital fingerprint will eventuallyprove cheaper to incorporate for banks than any ofthe keyboard-based encrypted solutions as thebiggest issue with PIN based access remains its vul-nerability to hackers after it has been keyed in by theuser and before it gets to the card reader.

Beyond finger scans Finger-based scans are just one of the multitude ofoptions that biometrics based authentication tech-nologies offer. There are other options such as

matching hand geometry to retina scans to iris scansand so on. Authentication can also be done based onquasi-behavioral attributes such as a person’s voice,handwriting, etc. Yet another is facial recognition,where a person's face is stored digitally and for eachtransaction, the live image of the person is comparedto the one stored in the database and co-related to hisaccount number. Hand geometry based systems arenot easy to implement though as their parameterschange with external factors such as weather condi-tions, cleanliness of hands, etc. Likewise, retina scansneed perfect alignment of the eye to reach the retinaat the back of the eye; a time consuming activity inpopulated areas. Iris scans are marginally better asthey do not require contact between the customer’seye and the biometric device to correlate the eye'scolored area (ie, the iris). Voice recognition at pres-ent seems the easiest of all biometric techniques asvoice can even be authenticated sitting at homethrough your phone. A survey conducted backs thisclaims saying that 95% of consumers prefer voice ver-ification compared with the 80% that are willing to ac-cept fingerprint scans. As mentioned earlier, voiceeven works remotely (by phone) whereas con-sumer’s need to install special fingerprint readersat their premises to be able to get themselves au-


Last month, a village near Bangalore called Devanahalli,was chosen by Canara Bank to feature the first-ever

biometric ATM in the country. Besides performing thefunctions of a regular ATM, it captures the fingerprints ofcustomers that would be transferred to the central serverthrough a CDMA phone. Thus a customer is authenticatedthrough his fingerprints instead of the four-digit pin. Sincethe initiative is targeted at rural users, a pre-recorded voicesystem in the appropriate regional language is included toguide the customer. In the first stage of its financial inclu-sion project, Canara Bank has opened 6 lakh ‘no-frills’accounts spread across 1639 villages all over the country,and hopes to increase this figure to 10 lakh by the end ofthis fiscal. These no-frills accounts go back to the verybasics of banking and allow deposits, withdrawals andaccount balance enquiries. The key here is the fact thathuman interaction with equipment or technology is done

in the local language, and to overcome resistance to tech-nology, voice, and not text is used as the primary mode ofcommunication.As part of its next pilot program, CanaraBank plans to equip villagers of Leisure and Kuluvanahallipockets of Karnataka with smartcards and soon spread itsreach across the country. The bank also uses fingerprintscanning to safeguard account details that are stored in anRFID chip. It has gone a step further and introducing whatit calls the ‘Mobile ATM’. This is essentially a van thathouses a toned down version of the ATM, powered by highcapacity batteries. The van would travel around villages,and be stationed at particular spots on definite days of themonth.Villagers who have no-frills account can enter thevan, scan their fingerprints and perform transactions.Assoon as the transaction is complete, the details would berecorded in a mobile phone and at the end of every ‘ses-sion’, the details would be uploaded to the central server.

��

Biometric banking@Canara Bank




thenticated online. But before this all is well acceptedand practiced, technical standards need to be estab-lished so that biometrics work universally. Work isin progress with a lot of ATM vendors pitching in withtheir devices, and we expect some action sooner thanlater in this space.

Micro-banking in rural areasWe have seen how biometric authentication can pro-vide a secure and remotely accessible channel forbank customers and how it can come in handy forbanks while servicing rural populace. Let’s now lookat some other initiatives taken by banks for the ruralsector. Rural banking is one area where political pres-sures play their part. One significant challenge forbanks while providing services to rural customers isthe change in government policies for agriculturistsand the related thrust on farm credit. However, tech-nologically their efforts depend on the availability oftelecom infrastructure. The silver lining here is thecontinued downward spiral in the prices of telecomproducts over the past few years. This trend is likelyto continue and is in alignment with the increasingdemand for networking backbone. This is great newsfor all customers, more so banks who are alwayslarge consumers of bandwidth. The reduced band-width costs mean that banks can get their far-flungbranches networked at far lower costs than was thecase earlier. This would also create redundancy andin turn greater resilience for their networks.

A combination of two technologies – RFID andNear Field Communication (NFC) – is all set to en-able the rural population of the country to performessential banking transactions. NXP Semiconduc-tors, founded by Philips, that co-invented the NFCtechnology has partnered with A Little World, inven-tors of a mobile platform for inclusive banking, havetried the concept of micro-banking in over 450 vil-lages across four states of the country. The technol-ogy involves setting up of Customer Service Pointsequipped with state-of-the-art mobile phones thatsupport NFC. Each villager who is an accountholder, will be given a biometric-enabled RFIDsmartcard, which will communicate with the mobilephone at the Customer Service Point. The smartcardessentially contains information about identity of thecustomer such as name, address, photograph, fin-gerprint templates and relevant details of the savingsor loan accounts held by the issuing bank. NFC, be-ing a short-range wireless connectivity technologyenables secure exchange of data between two de-vices, by just placing them together, pretty muchlike how Bluetooth functions. Since NFC effectivelycombines contactless identification and networkingtechnologies, it can communicate between an RFIDcard and an NFC mobile phone, or if required, be-tween two NFC devices. Currently, the NFC-enabledmobile phones used in this project are sourced fromMotorola and Nokia.

The NFC works on the concept of magnetic fieldinduction, and operates within theunlicensed radio frequency band of13.56MHz. Speeds can vary between106 Kbit/s, 212 Kbit/s and 424Kbit/s. It is an open platform tech-nology standardized in ECMA-340and operates with both the ‘active’and ‘passive’ modes of RFID. Duringits pilot run, Uttarakhand, Mizoram,Meghalaya and Andhra Pradeshhave been covered, and banks likeState bank of India, Union Bank, AxisBank, Andhra bank and the AndhraPradesh Grameen Bank have collab-orated with the project. In theWarangal district of AP, social se-curity pensioners were given their


��

A biometric-enabled RFID smartcard containing fingerprint scans communicates

with the mobile phone at the bank using ‘Near Field Communication’


payments using Micro-banking, and in places likeAizwal in Mizoram and Pithoragarh in Uttarakhand,the project introduced the concept of banking, sincethese areas have never had a bank before. Interest-ingly, the RFID cards used for the initiative were tai-lored around a completely different application.These cards are currently used in about 35 countriesincluding Singapore, the US, and the UK, on theirnewly issued e-passports. The RFID chips are em-bedded in the passports, and are aimed at reducing

paperwork and making the passport data tamper-proof. For the NFC initiative however, it is designedto eliminate the cost and effort to set up physicalbranches in rural areas, and providing services rang-ing from cash deposits, cash withdrawals, utility pay-ments, and money transfers.

Passengers, Goods and... ATMs on TrainsYou’ve seen mobile ATM vans across cities and ru-ral areas. But how about ATMs on railways---the ul-



With the entry of large foreign banks in the Indianbanking arena in 2009, Indian banks with their

relatively small sizes will be forced to consolidate to takethe increased competition head-on. Indian bankingindustry today faces unprecedented challenges (customeracquisition and retention, reducing costs of transactions,risk management, and regulatory compliance) to sustaintheir growth path. To leverage the opportunities present(and created) and the challenges tickling the industry,the sector is increasingly getting exposed to informationtechnology. Effective use of technology has dramaticallyimproved the efficiency of sector's operations, which hasled to increased productivity and profitability.

According to the IDC report titled India BFSI SectorIT Usage and Trends 2007-2011 Forecast and Analysis,the IT market in the Indian banking sector is forecastedto grow at CAGR of 13.0% for the period of 2006-2011.The key IT segments in the Indian banking industrywould be the Packaged Software, PCs, Mid-range Serversand Networking Equipment. The IT deploymentsin the banks will not only act as a facilitator forfurther expansion but will also help the banks indealing with the issues of storage, security, under-standing customer informatics and regulatorycompliances. Banks are increasingly becomingtechnology-intensive and are looking to leverageIT to meet the exponentially increasing consumerdemands in terms of cost, efficiency, convenienceand reliability. The banks in India are looking toprovide Web-based trade support, real-time grosssettlement, online tax accounting system, value-added transaction services and basic online trans-

action services, to attract and retain customers. The keyIT solutions being targeted by the Indian banking indus-try are networking, customer relationship management,business intelligence, Internet banking and storage andsecurity solutions. By leveraging IT the banks are lookingto develop alternative delivery channels such as ATMs,tele-banking, and Mobile banking. Thus IT is playing avery crucial role in bringing the banking sector to its realworth and is focusing more on customer convenienceand development of banking habits among all. Also thebanking system will become transparent in its dealingsand will adopt global best practices in accounting anddisclosures driven by the motto of value enhancement forall the stakeholders involved. Technology would make theflow of information much faster, more accurate andenable quicker analysis of data received. Therefore theconventional definition of banking will make way for themore tech-enabled banking; all because of increased ITorientation of the Indian banking industry.

Increasing IT Orientation of the Indian Banking IndustryS

ca

lin

g u

p o

f IT

In

fra

str

uc

ture

1960s 1980s 1990s 2004s 2008s 2011s

Punch Card

Equipments

Branch

Automation

Branch Networking,

Total Bank Automation

and ATMs

CRM, RTGS

and Core

Banking

Data

Warehousing and

Consolidation

and BPM

BASEL II Compliance,

Innovation, Product

Bundling, Anti-Money

Laundering

��

Parishesh Mishra and Arpan Gupta, Industry Verticals Research Practice, IDC India




timate mobility solution. Close on the heels of settingup of ATMs on railway platforms, the governmenthas given permission to banks to set up ATMs ontrains! And why not, with the progress in telecommu-nications such as improved VSAT and microwavelinks, technology has become a key enabler for set-ting this infrastructure. Right now, there are morethan 1800 ATMs on railway platforms across India.Most of these are placed in the bigger and more pop-ular stations in metros, which is logical as these sta-tions see enormous number of passengerscommuting on a daily basis. Having ATMs on trainswould help passengers coming from the smaller

cities and towns, where the infrastructure to estab-lish ATMs or other such mobile banking solutions iseither simply non-existent or proves pretty expen-sive. Plus, there are security concerns. In fact, a long-distance train could act as the fastest and longestmobile carrier of ATMs across this vast country. Thiswould also ensure safety of passengers as they neednot carry large sums of cash during journey. Insteadthey can withdraw money as and when required.This facility can further be enhanced by installing e-ticketing kiosks alongside the ATMs. This means apassenger can withdraw money and buy rail ticketsat the same place!

Being the largest bank in the country what challenges you

face and how can IT help overcome those?

There are two immediate challenges—the bank’s size and its

geographical reach. IT is helping us in handling banking vol-

umes, amount of transactions and accounts. There are 100

million accounts in the system and over 20 million transac-

tions in a day. In three years time, we plan to grow about five

times this volume and without IT infrastructure it is not possi-

ble. There has to be similar IT infrastructure across all branch-

es. However, IT infrastructure deficiency is the main challenge.

What are the key technologies/solutions that you are using

to speed up internal process across branches?

We are trying to reduce footfalls in our transits by providing

alternative channels to people. Right now around 20 lakh

transactions take place through these channels. Currently we

have 11,000 branches and 7,000 ATMs. To enable a smooth

communication amongst various branches we have set up our

own network using various technologies such as CDMA,VSAT

and radio frequency.

How do you ensure security from your as well as cus-

tomer’s end?

There are two levels of security. One is manual security for

identity protection and the other is system security. SBI was

the first bank to come up with a document called security poli-

cy of bank. Even for networking the security policy is

deployed.When a message is moved from the branch to the

datacenter, it is encrypted. Even if someone intercepts it, he

will not be able to crack the code. Even for other transactions

bank has come up with documented security policy, which is

followed meticulously. There are regular audits carried out to

check the security of the system.We have ISO certificates for

our datacenters. In the datacenters, nobody has access to data.

On our website password is not asked. So we issue a warning

that if someone I asking the password do not mention.We are

looking at biometrics in ATM.

How does SBI use technology to serve rural customers?

We have 6600 rural branches.We have put most of them on

core banking. The last phase of connectivity should be com-

pleted by March.We use VSAT in such remote areas. The ques-

tion is not of connectivity alone. I have to service

them later on. The issue in rural

areas is, that there are hardly any

private players giving connec-

tivity.We are planning to

move to banking through

mobile sets, as mobile pene-

tration is good in these areas.

We are also looking at kiosk

banking or setting up a PC

wherein a person can look after it

and operate it.We have mobile

ATMs, which go from place

to place.We also have

mobile VSATs.

�

S K Sehgal

GM, IT - State Bank of India

In rural areas we plan to move to banking through mobile sets,as mobile penetration is good“

”


Technology

It’s long since we’ve been talking

about wireless technologies through

our articles and with the passage of

time we’ve seen how these technologies

have evolved. Today, these technologies

have matured to such an extent that

they’ve ceased to remain just a product

or a technology but are influencing

our lives in a big way. Our future no

doubt lies in a wireless world and in this

article we’ll see how wireless devices

influence our official, personal and so-

cial Lives, and the technologies behind

all this.

VoWLAN in enterprisesFor today’s enterprises, the biggest chal-

lenge is to contact the right person at the

right time through the right medium.

This is of course is not the core objective

of wireless but a very important applica-

tion nonetheless. The most prominent

technology that we have see in this arena

is VoWLAN.The technology is not rocket

science or something that has just come

out of research labs but is essentially two

technologies coupled with each other.

‘Vo’ stands for Voice and WLAN for WiFi.

This means voice over standard WiFi

links.


Anindya Roy, Jasmine Desai, with inputs from Shashwat Chaturvedi

��

From short range wireless technologies such as Bluetooth, ZigBee and RFID to metropolitan area technologies such as WiMax and VoWLAN, there’s not a single moment in life when we are not touched bythese.What’s more they’re even protecting wild life. Let’s explore the enchanting world of wireless

technology-wireless.qxp 10/24/2007 5:11 PM Page 30

hope that with stronger security mecha-

nisms in place, we’ll see more deploy-

ments based on WiMAX in future.

RFID in enterprisesWe’re no strangers to this technology that

already has made such a huge impact. Its

applications are enormous for enter-

prises.And has been further accentuated

by its adoption and development by gi-

ants such as Microsoft.Recently the com-

pany launched Biztalk RFID that allows

users to incorporate RFID into various

applications and workflows. Microsoft

has used a new software layer approach

that allows all kind of RFID devices, be it

a current RFID device, a previous gener-

ation device or next-generation sensors

and Electronic Product Code (EPC) read-

ers to be incorporated, in a plug and play

manner.From a developer’s point of view,

such a unique event processing engine

helps in creating, deploying and manag-

ing end to end logical RFID processes

that are independent of device type and

device communication protocols. The

best part of BizTalk RFID is that it can be

integrated with the current line of busi-

ness applications such as Enterprise Re-

source Planning (ERP) systems, Ware-

house Management Systems (WMS), etc.

The best part is that for such an integra-

tion no major modifications are re-

quired; it works automatically. You can

read more details on MS BizTalk RFID on

pg 136 in our Extraedge section.

Social Impact of RadioTelemetry and GISThe battle between poachers and tigers

has continued since ages. Technology

can help save the tiger in a big way, start-

ing right from investigation to prosecu-

tion. Data available at the Project Tiger

Directorate indicates that out of 173

deaths of tigers during 1999-2004, 83

were caused by poaching. You’ll be sur-

prised to know that poachers use sophis-

ticated communication devices such as

wireless sets, UHB Radio, and even Ham

radio for tracking tigers. Tiger reserves

on the contrary are not equipped with

adequate means of communication to

counter illegal activities. Radio teleme-

try can be used to track a lion or a tiger.

Here, a tiger is tranquilized and a collar

containing a radio antenna is put across

his neck. A researcher armed with a re-

ceiver can easily track a tiger with the aid

of radio telemetry.

Geographical Information Systems

(GIS) is another tool to track the move-

ment of various animals and birds such

as Siberian cranes.The radio collars have

a small GPS attachment that can be pro-

grammed to switch on at specific times

in during a day. These GPS devices then

search for the nearest satellites and once

a connection has been established, you

can easily fix the location of the animal.

The unit switches off by itself and trans-

mits data to handheld devices which can

be transferred on to a GIS.In India,WWF

is using GPS to track elephants in Assam

by following elephant herds, or using

secondary indicators of elephant move-


Technology

Saving tigers from poachers: Radio telemetry can be used to track a tiger in the wild. Here, a collar containing a radio transmitter

is put around the wild cat’s neck. Wildlife officials armed with a receiver can easily keep track of the tiger’s movements

Fring is a simple, freely available tool

that lets you call any GSM, VoWLAN or

Messenger with your Windows Mobile

��

Technology-wireless.qxp 10/24/2007 5:05 PM Page 32

rates and are also power-constrained.Zig-

Bee promises a completely networked

home where all devices are able to com-

municate and be controlled by a single

unit.Imagine a home with different enter-

tainment units, various security systems

like fire and intrusion protections, air-

conditioners and other appliances that

have embedded applications supporting

ZigBee and through a single unit all these

devices could be accessed and controlled.

And as this device is going to consume low

power, it will have extended battery usage

life. You can think of similar home-office

scenarios, as well.

Personal applications of BluetoothYes it’s old. But that reaffirms the old

adage, which says ‘the old is gold’. With

the advent of Bluetooth, we first heard

the concept of a PAN (Personal Area Net-

work). Now, the network has become

more sophisticated and we call it a HAN

(Home Area Network). The applications

based on Bluetooth standards are grad-

ually coming in the market, further

boosting such networking concepts.

Now we have a car stereo system which

comes integrated with Bluetooth, so that

you one can directly stream your music

files stored in phones to the car stereo

system. Not only that, the car stereo gets

mute when a call comes to the phone.

But trust me this is not going to end up

in the car stereos. We are seeing software

and infrastructures that can integrate all

your digital lifestyle systems over the

Bluetooth to update your proximity and

presence in an intelligent system environ-

ment. Bluetooth being a small distance

communication channel gives the flexibil-

ity to devices kept in a room to sense that

someone is entering the room and the per-

son can also be identified.All this can hap-

pen by the Bluetooth connection of the

person’s phone. So, if you want to hide

yourself from your manager,you just have

to keep your mobile’s Bluetooth connec-

tivity off!

Coming back to the waiting area,once a

visitor enters the waiting area of your office

you can greet him, simply by setting some

messages,as soon as your Bluetooth system

detects his arrival.Or for that matter as your

friend enters your car,the car starts playing

music of her choice. Start her favorite TV

channel,etc.Not only this,when a phone call

comes to any mobile in the car, the celebra-

tion goes to mute. Once the call is over, the

device again tunes back to normal.

No,this is not the future or science fic-

tion. This is possible today and that too at

an affordable price. You can try out the

SmartHome project from LinuxMCE at

http://linuxmce.com/ for more details

about such devices and applications. You

can even buy such readymade products

and solutions from a company called

IPTriplePlay. The name of the solution

is Pluto. You can see a nice flash

video demo of such a smart home at

http://www.iptp.net/showflash_en.html.

These are only a few names but trust me

there are a handful of vendors and prod-

ucts in the market, and their tribe is

growing fast.


Technology

�

Using a mobile phone you can control all electric equipment such as ACs, geysers,

TVs, etc wirelessly using Bluetooth

A car stereo integrated with Bluetooth.You can directly stream music files from any

Bluetooth mobile device and enjoy your favorite music while driving

Sourc

e:

iptp

.com

technology-wireless.qxp 10/24/2007 5:19 PM Page 36

Trends

Even as the Blu-ray vs HD-DVD bat-

tle is heading to its logical conclu-

sion (of co-existence or the lack of

it), another format war has reached its

crescendo – the war of office suite for-

mats. Microsoft recently approached the

International Standards Organization

(ISO) for a fast-track decision on the

adoption of its format, which is used by

Office 2007, as a certified global format.

ISO, which has already ratified the Open

Document Format (ODF) as a standard,

announced on September 5th that Mi-

crosoft’s format, the Open Office XML

(OOXML) failed to get a ‘resounding yes’

from its panel consisting of technology

companies and all the UN member

nations.

Wait and watchThe final ratification of OOXML as a stan-

dard by the ISO will now have to wait till

February next year,when the ISO will hold

a ballot resolution meeting and Microsoft

will be asked to address and counter the

concerns, apprehensions and brickbats

put forward by various participating

countries. In other words, Microsoft has

about six months to beef up the OOXML

format to suit international standards and

gather more support.

Microsoft has already started its en-

deavor to mend the biggest flaw of

OOXML– interoperability. It has under-

taken to beef up its partnership with ven-

dors to tackle interoperability issues in

design, technology and standardization.

It has also announced a continuing col-

laboration with AOL and Yahoo! for in-

stant messaging, and Novell for virtual-

ization applications, besides the creation

of what it calls the Interoperability Vendor

Alliance. But its biggest achievement in

this regard is said to be the successful de-

ployment of what it calls the Open XML

Translator, essentially a combination of

tools that allow translation between ODF

based applications and OOXML formats,

the source code for which is available un-

der what is called a BSD license. Having

got its roots from Berkeley Software Dis-

tribution,BSD represents a family of free-

for-use software licenses worldwide.

Divided supportersWhile HP, Intel, EMC, Sony Electronics,

Apple and Lexmark International have

come out strongly in support of Microsoft,

Oracle and IBM continue to support ODF.

Germany and the US voted in favor of Mi-

crosoft, while Britain and France voiced a

clear ‘no’ but were open to supporting Mi-

crosoft in future if‘vital modifications’are

incorporated in the OOXML structure.In-

dia preferred to follow this argument,

though initially it went all out against Mi-

crosoft.As expected,the technical institu-

tions,IITs and IIMs are completely in sup-

port of ODF, and believe that the OOXML

is not ‘open’ enough to be certified as a

global standard, as it doesn’t represent a

common ground across products. They

argue that ODF has originated through a

process of evolution and right since its in-

ception, it has been completely ‘vendor

neutral’.

Growth of ODFODF is the brainchild of Sun Microsys-

tem’s OpenOffice, formerly known as Star

Office,started off in 1999 by Star Division,

as an attempt to build a non-proprietary

XML-based interoperable office suite. A

year later,Sun Microsystems acquired Star

Division and for the next two years, all it

did was to invite source codes through an

open-to-all licensing mechanism. An

XML community project was also em-

barked upon,and the two finally united in

December 2002, at an OASIS (Organiza-

tion for Advancement of Structured Infor-

mation Standards) conference, where the

arrival of ODF was formally upheld.

Vendor supportBut it was only in May 2006, after regular

overhauling, public consultations and two

enhanced draft versions of the format were

released,that the ODF achieved ISO certifi-

cation.The next obvious step was to consol-

idate this fete by attracting other software

creators into adopting the ODF. One of the

first to oblige was Adobe, which up-

graded its PDF format to sync up with


Vishnu Anand

Applies To: Office applications’users

USP: Comparing the marketstakes for the two global officesuite formats

Primary Link: www.iso.org

Google Keywords: ODF,OOXML

DIRECT HIT!

��

OOXML or ODF:Which One Will Survive?Against the backdrop of the same old Open Source vs Paid debate, two formats are vying for global acceptancefrom ISO in the office suite space

technology-office format wars_final.qxp 10/23/2007 12:43 PM Page 38

ODF. In July 2006, Google joined the ODF

bandwagon by allowing compatibility of its

online Office suite, Google Apps (which in-

cludes individual applications like Google

Docs and Google Spreadsheets) with ODF.

Besides Google and Adobe, the ODF loyal-

ists’ club includes founder members IBM,

Oracle, Red Hat and Novell.

The simple idea of designing a skeleton

for software developers to build their appli-

cations on,specifically office and word pro-

cessing applications,and requiring them to

only tweak the backend system to suit their

needs did the trick for ODF. To simplify

things further, the ODF architecture has

sub-divided the systems into convenient

and flexible components – Scalable Vector

Graphics (SVG), Mathematical Formulas

(MathML), Embedded links (XLink), Syn-

chronized Multimedia Integration Lan-

guage (SMIL) and Forms definitions

(XForms), each of which is built on Open

Source platform. While SVG is an XML

specification that allows scripting for static

and animated graphics,MathML integrates

mathematical formulae into WWW docu-

ments, and XLink allows the inclusion of

hyperlinks within XML documents.

Xforms, originally designed for XHTML,

incorporates the Web Forms functions into

the application while SMIL is the language

for describing multimedia presentations

within an XML based framework.

Beefing up OOXMLOOXML on the other hand is a beefed up

version of Microsoft’s XML based format

that was introduced as part of Office 2003

suite.Back then,data was not compressed

and was stored in a single XML file, with

binary data, like images, being repre-

sented as BASE64 strings. This is a posi-

tional notation process that uses the

alphabets A-Z and numerals 0-9 for first

64 digits of the code, while the last two

digits are various combinations of num-

bers and digits with specific tags.

But during the development of Office

12 (more popularly known as Office 2007),

Microsoft resorted to following an ODF

model by storing data in a number of small

packet files, each of which are embedded

within a .zip file.Having got this format cer-

tified by the European Computer Manufac-

turers Association (ECMA), Microsoft ap-

proached ISO for certification.

Head to headAt the very basic level of document read-

ability, both ODF and OOXML work in the

same way,and no visible difference can be

observed in terms of ‘openness’. But the

shortcoming clearly lies in two depart-

ments – backward compatibility and gen-

eralization across platforms. In that re-

spect, ODF and OOXML were created for

two distinctly different purposes. While

Microsoft intended the OOXML to be in

sync with the feature set of Office 2007,

and make it backward compatible with

earlier editions of the suite, ODF began as

a general document markup format, cre-

ated for and by Linux enthusiasts.As Open

Source grew out of Linux boom, so did

ODF. Hence, it can be

compared to what

HTML did to Web

pages.As of now,ODF

has come to be

known as a format

that is conducive to

creating new office

suite applications

that wish to be called

‘Open Source suites;’ which in turn trans-

lates as a format that encourages compe-

tition and development of new products,

each similar to the other. Contrary to this,

OOXML ensures that nobody can clone

the Microsoft model of Office, while pay-

ing more emphasis on detail and smooth

operation.

User interestBy the time the ISO panel meets in Febru-

ary, Microsoft should make the OOXML

‘open’enough for use by any third party de-

veloper, who in all probability, will belong

to the open source community. The devel-

oper should be able to use,modify,interop-

erate and sync up existing and newer appli-

cations on the OOXML platform. This will

ensure two things – a certain similarity of

the OOXML to ODF in terms of flexibility

and interoperability and two, a major

chunk of Microsoft’s proprietary Office

backbone thrown open for external devel-

opers to modify and create new applica-

tions. From the users’ perspective, this

would mean an automatic sync up between

multiple office suite applications,irrespec-

tive of which vendor they have purchased it

from.When two or more office suites begin

‘talking’to each other,it will create room for

better usability, synchronization and the

ability to invoke specific applications from

other suites, if needed.For instance, a doc-

ument or spreadsheet you have created us-

ing one vendor’s application,can be opened

and modified in another’s – because they

would have been created around the same

universal format. For a developer, this

means a massive broadening of arenas for

collaborations, XML-based programs that

blend across different products and appli-

cations,and a common skeleton that can be

done up the way your unique application

demands. If all goes well, this fete will be

achieved by the end of February,after ISO’s

final meeting to settle the ODF versus

OOXML battle.


Trends

�

Created in 1999 2003

Created by StarOffice Microsoft

USP Interoperability,

support from Open

Source community

Massive user base,

keen interest from

Microsoft supporters

and vendors

How they Compare

ODF OOXML

technology-office format wars_final.qxp 10/23/2007 12:44 PM Page 40

Enterprise Implementation


Remote App Streaming The upcoming Windows 2008 Server has built Application Streaming into its Terminal Services.

This allows you to stream a single application to as many users as you want over the network

In the September ’07 issue we prom-

ised to do a series on the upcoming

Windows Server 2008, code named

Longhorn, and take you through a new

feature every month after we’ve actually

worked on it. That time has finally come,

and this month, we’re starting with ‘not’

one, but two exciting new features in

Windows Server 2008.

The feature we’re going to cover in

this article is remote application

streaming. However, before we get into

this feature, there’s some good news:

MS has released Windows Server 2008

RC0 this month. With this release, the

long-awaited first public beta of Mi-

crosoft’s Hypervisor is also out.

So in a separate article, we’re going

to tell you all about the new Hypervisor.

Remote App Streaming Application Streaming, is not new, but

it’s not too old either. Citrix Presenta-

tion Server provides the same on Win-

dows Platform. But that is a third party

software, which you need to purchase

separately.

Windows Server 2008 has the ap-

plication streaming feature built in. Be-

fore we go further and see how to install

and use it, let’s first understand what is

Remote App Streaming.

Streaming refers to accessing data

or files before it has completely down-

loaded or landed on your local machine.

The common term which most of us are

familiar with is media (music and video)

streaming. Here you listen or watch a me-

dia file without having the file locally on

your machine.

Similarly, when we say application

streaming, we mean running a file or an

app without installing or having it on

your local machine. The app resides on a

server and executes utilizing the re-

sources of server. All you’re accessing is

the display of that app on your terminal.

The benefits of application streaming

are plenty. You can have a single copy of

app and stream it across to hundreds of

users. The users on the other hand can

access the app from anywhere using any

machine. The mgmt becomes easier as

the admin has to manage, update, and se-

cure a single copy of the app residing on

the server.

Another good thing about such a

method of app delivery is that it uses re-

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LH

��

From this Window you can select as many installed apps as you want to stream over

Terminal Services

enterprise implementation_Remote App Streaming with Windows Server 2008_final.qxp 10/23/2007 1:39 PM Page 68

sources of the server and you don’t have

to upgrade all nodes or desktops in case

you are upgrading one app whose system

requirements do not meet the require-

ment of the desktops.

Pre-RequisitesThere aren’t too many pre-requisites to

test App Streaming. A machine with de-

cent processing capability and a good

amount of RAM is sufficient. We installed

it on a Core 2 Duo Extreme 3.0 machine

with 2 GB RAM. The machine should be

connected over the network so that a node

can connect to it and access the streamed

app. We used a standard 100 Mbps net-

work for this. The version of Windows

Server 2008 used was the latest RC0 re-

lease. It is available for download from Mi-

crosoft’s website.

The client can be any machine run-

ning on Windows XP, 2000, 2003, Vista,

or Longhorn Server. But the only prereq-

uisite is that it should have Remote Desk-

top Client version 6.0 installed. Longhorn

and Vista come preloaded with RDC 6.0

but for WinXP, Win2000, and Win 2003,

you have to download and install it from

http://support.microsoft.

com/kb/925876.

InstallationThis is pretty straightforward. All you

need to do is add the Terminal Server Role

to your Windows Server 2008 and install

the Remote App functionality. To do so, first

open the Server Manager Console from Ad-

ministrative Tools and click on the Roles

option at the left pane of the window. Now

from the main window click on the ‘Add

Roles’ link. It will open up a wizard. Click

on ‘Next’ once and it will show you all the

possible 17/18 Roles available with Win-

dows Server 2008. Check the ‘Terminal

Services’ role and continue the wizard.

After clicking a few more ‘Next’ but-

tons you will land to a screen where you

will be asked to select a ‘Role Service’ for

the terminal service role. Select on ‘Termi-

nal Services.’ Now again continue with the

wizard till you are asked to specify an au-

thentication method for your Terminal

Services. If it is for a test setup (which most

likely will be the case) select the second op-

tion which says ‘Do not require Network

Level Authentication.’ Now continue

pressing Next till you get a summary page

which asks you to confer and start the in-

stallation. Click on the Install button and

let it finish. With this believe it or not your

App Streaming Server setup is done.

Streaming an ApplicationAs your Streaming server is installed, now

share an app for streaming. We tried it out

with two apps. One was the good old Word-

Pad and the other Adobe Photoshop 7,

both worked flawlessly.

Adding a new app for streaming is also

a very simple process. All you have to do is

first install the app (which you want to

stream) on the server. Then go to Adminis-

trative Tools>Terminal Services and start

the ‘TS RemoteApp Manager’ console.

Click on the ‘Add RemoteApp Program’

link. A wizard opens up, click on Next on

the first page and it will list down all the in-

stalled apps on the server. Select all the

apps you want to stream and click Next.

Two more clicks and the wizard finishes.

Now, at the bottom of the ‘RemoteApp

Manager’ console a new table appears.

Here you will see all the apps selected for

streaming. Click on them one by one. A

new list appears at the right end of con-

sole. Here you will notice two links ‘Creat

.rdp file’ and ‘Create Windows Installer

Package.’ Clicking on any of these starts

the wizard. Depending on the link you

have clicked, at the end of the wizard an

.msi or an .rdp file get generated. Now you

can copy these files to any client machine.

Here the .rdp file is a direct shortcut to con-

nect to the Streamed app whereas .msi file

is an installer which installs the .rdp file to

the program files of the client machine.

The benefit of the .msi file is that you can

do a remote deployment of the .rdp file to

all the machines at a go.

Once done, click on .rdp file. It first

asks for authentication and then con-

nects and opens the streamed app from

any machine on the network running

on any Windows OS and terminal server

client 6.0. When the app starts, it’s very

difficult to explore if it’s running locally

or from any remote machine.



On the window, first click on the application listed at the bottom and then click on the

.rdp file to create a rdp shortcut for connecting the application

�

enterprise implementation_Remote App Streaming with Windows Server 2008_final.qxp 10/23/2007 1:40 PM Page 69



Virtualization in Windows Server 2008 The first public beta of Microsoft’s Hypervisor has been released for its upcoming server OS.We

checked out how well it works and the pre-requisites for setting it up

Finally, the long-awaited Windows

hypervisor has been released with

the Windows Server 2008 RC0,

which was earlier code named Long-

horn. The Hypervisor is still in its in-

fancy, but that does not reflect upon the

installation process, which is as simple

as adding a new Role to any Windows

Server.

Once it is installed, you will love its

usability and performance. Before we go

ahead, let’s first understand in a nut-

shell what exactly is a hypervisor.

Understanding hypervisors A hypervisor is a technique to run virtu-

alization in full-virtualization mode,

which means a setup where the virtual-

ization layer essentially runs on top of

the hardware and below the Operating

System. You will know the difference by

comparing it with any traditional virtu-

alization system, where the virtualiza-

tion layer runs on top of the host. The

hypervisor runs directly on top of the

hardware, and uses the virtualization

features of the underlying CPU, eg. In-

tel’s VT and AMD’s Pacifica.

As the virtualization layer sits

directly on top of the hardware, it is very

thin and lightweight. It is also more re-

source conscious. Both of these features

make its performance much better as

compared to traditional virtualization

techniques.

The other well known hypervisor is

XEN from Citrix.

PrerequisitesTo run Windows hypervisor, the list of

prerequisites is not small. As we said ear-

lier the hardware should be running

processors supporting virtualization na-

tively.

For our tests, we used a machine

with an Intel Core2Duo Extreme 3.0

GHz processor, which supports Intel VT.

We used 2 GB RAM, as we had to dedi-

cate some of it to the guest machine and

some to the host running Windows

Server 2008.

Currently only the 64-bit version of

Windows Server 2008 RC0 supports the

installation of hypervisor, so we had a

copy of this as well.

InstallationFor installation of the Microsoft Hyper-

visor or the Windows Server Virtualiza-

tion role, you have to do some tweaking

before you can install it through the

Server Management console. This is

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��

Top two: Windows XP and 2003 running as virtual machines on Windows Server Vir-

tualization. Bottom: Virtualization Management console to configure the VMs

SERIES

PART III

LH

enterprise implementation_Windows Hypervisor_final.qxp 10/23/2007 11:20 PM Page 68

because WSV is not present in the Add

Role wizard of Server Management con-

sole, by default. To get this role enabled,

you have to first install two updates. No,

you don’t have to download anything.

These updates ship along with the Win-

dows Server 2008 RC0 but have to be in-

stalled separately.

To do so, first go to <system volume>

\Windows\WSV. Here, you will see two

MSU files. Install both of them, one by

one. Once the installation is done, go

back to the Server Management con-

sole’s Add role wizard and you will see a

new role called

Windows Server

Virtualization.

Now, go to Ad-

ministrative tools

and start Server

Management con-

sole. Click on the

Roles option from

the left of the win-

dow.

Now, if you

can see Add role in

the main window

pane, then click on it. A

wizard will open. Select

the penultimate option,

which says Windows

Server Virtualization

and follow the wizard

till that gets installed.

Using theHypervisorTo start working with

the Windows Server Vir-

tualization, go to the Administrative

tools again and click on the Windows Vir-

tualization Manager. A win-

dow will open.

From this window you

can create, manage, modify

and delete any guest OS on

the server.

To create a new guest OS

you just have to click on

Newon the right hand side

pane of the main window. It

will open up a drop-down

which will ask you whether

you want to create a Virtual

machine, a Hard disk, or a

Floppy disk.

Click on the Virtual machine option

and a new wizard will pop up.

Follow the wizard as shown in the images

and it will create a virtual machine for

you.

Once you have created virtual ma-

chines, it’s just a matter of turning them

on and using them from the Windows

Virtualization Manager interface.

Interesting findingsOne great thing about WSV is that it is

backward compatible with .vhd files cre-

ated by VPC or MS Virtual Server. And

it’s just a matter of creating new virtual

machines with pre-existing hard-disk

images, to use those old VHD’s with WSV.

One problem we faced during this was

that the graphical interface of Linux is

not very compatible with WSV, till now.

We tried installing Fedora 7, Gentoo and

Mandriva on top of WSV, but none of

them were able to start the graphical in-

terface while installing. But, as this is the

first public Beta release of WSV, it might

be happening due to a bug, which will

eventually be rectified.

Right now the technology looks very

promising and we expect to see it evolv-

ing as a robust hypervisor for Windows

platform, in the coming future.



File name: client.conf

Windows Hypervisor let’s you create virtual machines through

a simple wizard. It first asks you to give your VM a name

You can define a new virtual HDD for your virtual machine,

or boot from an existing one made from MS VPS or VS

You can install the OS for your VM from an optical

disk, or from an ISO image �

enterprise implementation_Windows Hypervisor_final.qxp 10/23/2007 11:20 PM Page 69



IIS 7:A Modular ApproachInternet Information Server 7 changes the way Microsoft Web Server works by moving every-

thing into a modular pipelined approach

In the Web world today, IIS and

Apache are the two leaders in Web

servers. Although a leader for a very

long time, Apache has slowly been

losing ground to IIS over the last few

months as covered by Netcraft.

A new version of IIS waiting in the

wings is further set to erode the domi-

nance of Apache by introducing a huge

bunch of features. We shall take a look

at these features in the coming months.

This month we start off with a two part

look at the way IIS7 manages the fea-

tures it provides using modules in a

pipeline rather than a monolithic

implementation.

Traditionally, IIS has always been an

all-or-nothing solution. That is, you ei-

ther install IIS in full or don’t install it at

all. Even in Windows Server 2003, al-

though it was not installed by default,

when you chose to install IIS Web Server,

it would install all the features associ-

ated with the Web server– whether you

wanted them or not.

In IIS7 this approach has been

changed completely. Rather than hav-

ing everything installed by default, you

can pick and choose the modules you

want to install. Before we get into that,

let’s look at the architectural differences

between IIS6 and IIS7 that make this

modularity possible.

IIS 6 ArchitectureIIS6 has what’s called the Classic Re-

quest Pipeline. This is the traditional

method in which the core Web server

can basically do one thing – pick up a re-

quested file and send it to the client. It

also has a number of other features built

in – such as Authentication (Anony-

mous, Basic, NTLM, etc), Logging, Com-

pression, etc. Using all of this, the Web

server is great at picking up static files

such as HTML and images and sending

them back to the client. But what about

non-static pages such as ASP/ASP.NET

or PHP? This is where a deterministic

feature creates a new path in the request

pipeline. It has basically two parts – one

is mapping that tells the Web server that

if a file of a particular type is requested

then it should not simply send it to the

user but divert it to the second part. The

second part in turn is either a CGI or

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allows features of IIS and

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SERIES

PART I

IIS

��

IIS6’s Classic Request pipeline had many different paths depending on the requested

file, which resulted in lots of feature duplication

IIS6 Architecture

AUTHENTICATION

AUTHENTICATION

MAPPING

MAPPING

RESPONSE

RESPONSE

None

Forms Windows

ASPX AXD

Redirection Caching

Basic NTLM

SAP.NET

Static

Logging Compression

CGI ISAPI

enterprise implementation-iis7_final.qxp 10/23/2007 1:10 PM Page 68

an ISAPI component that loads the file

and processes it before returning the

output back to the original pipeline, so

that it is sent back to the client. Now

comes the slightly strange part. The new

path that is created can also have its own

set of features. For instance, ASP.NET

2.0 also has its own authentication rou-

tines – Forms or Windows – that can be

used in its pages. Not only that, ASP.NET

also has its own deterministic mapping

for processing different types of

ASP.NET files. Refer to the diagram on

the IIS6 architecture to understand this.

IIS 7 ArchitectureIn IIS7, the architecture has been

changed completely. Instead of having a

pipeline that diverts into different paths,

IIS7 now has what is called an ‘Inte-

grated Pipeline.’ This uses the modular-

ity of IIS7 architecture to use features

from both IIS as well as compatible solu-

tions like ASP.NET.

To give a better understanding of

what this means, consider this: the issue

of feature duplication in IIS6 in different

pipelines, say Authentication in both IIS

and ASP.NET is now done away with.

Each type of authentication is simply a

module for IIS7 that can be integrated

into the main IIS pipeline itself. This

means that now IIS7 itself can have not

just Anonymous, Basic and NTLM au-

thentication, but also Forms and Win-

dows based authentication. This goes for

all other such features as well.

In fact, the whole concept of having

ISAPI or CGI as a jump-off point into a

different pipeline is now redundant (al-

though still available in case of need for

backward compatibility). This

allows ASP.NET itself to be a part of the

IIS7 pipeline rather than running as a

new path in the system. Now these are

not the only modules one can have –

there are more than 40 modules avail-

able in IIS7 out of the box that can be

used on the websites on the IIS7 web

server. There are many others that one

can either download or actually go

ahead and write in .NET using the IIS7

SDK. But there is one more feature of

this modular approach that makes it a

real killer application.

Remember that in IIS6, ASP.NET

was an ISAPI extension and a 3rd party

platform such as PHP was a CGI app?

CGI traditionally has been slower as well

as less supported on IIS6 due to its na-

ture. However, due to the integrated na-

ture of the pipeline in IIS7, PHP can now

be part of this pipeline as well and start

using the modules of the pipeline like

any other module. That is to say, PHP

too can start using features like Forms

and Windows authentication just like

ASP.NET 2.0 can within IIS7. This gives

PHP developers a great new Web server

platform to develop on to be able to take

advantage of features that the Web

server provides rather than writing it

themselves.

This, however, is an article for an-

other day. We’ll take a look at exactly

how to do this on IIS7 next month. Till

then, head over to www.iis.net to see

some samples of other modules that are

available as well.



�

IIS7 has an integrated pipeline where features of IIS and ASP.NET are both used as

modules in the pipeline, and even other platforms like PHP can use these features

IIS7 Architecture

AUTHENTICATION

MAPPING

RESPONSE

None Basic NTLM Forms Windows

Static CGI ISAPI ASPX

Logging Compression Redirection Caching

AXD

enterprise implementation-iis7_final.qxp 10/23/2007 1:11 PM Page 69



The Linux Rescue BoxCreate images of all user workstations on your network and back them up to a central Linux Rescue Server,

which allows you to burn those images to CD/DVD or restore them directly over the network later

Backing up data from your users’

workstations is one of the most

taxing jobs for a system admin-

istrator, and it gets tougher with more

machines, and even more if multiple

OSs are involved. In this article, we will

see how to build a backup box, which

will do an image-based backup of work-

stations and later on facilitate restora-

tion over the network as well. Plus, it

can also be used to do remote image-

based OS deployments on backbone ma-

chines across the organization.

For this, we are using a Linux-based

backup system called ‘Linux rescue

server’. The software will allow you to

take image-based backups of your Win-

dows XP, Windows 2000/2003 or any

UNIX/Linux platform. You can download

the Rescue Server from the link given in

the Direct Hit box. You will get an ISO file,

that has to be burnt on a CD using Nero

or any other CD writing software. Make

sure you burn it at 4X writing speed.

Installation To install the Linux rescue server, hence-

forth called LRS, you will require at least

a P4 machine with 256 MB RAM and 80

GB HDD. Boot this machine with from the

LRS CD you just created. It will ask you to

fill in the IP address, Subnet mask, Gate-

way, etc.

Then you would be asked to select

keyboard layout etc. The installation

takes only 15 minutes. Remove the CD

and restart the machine and your LRS is

ready.

To configure LRS, take another ma-

chine connected on the same Subnet

and from a browser type in the IP

address http://<IP_Addrees_of_your

_Linux_Rescue_server>:1000. Give

username as ’root’ and password as ’lin-

box’ and you will be taken to its manage-

ment interface.

Configuring DHCP settings As our rescue server uses PXE (Preboot

eXecution Environment) for backing up

and restoring workstation data, you

need to configure a DHCP server on it. If

you already have a DHCP server, you

simply need to configure your server to

enable network booting of your rescue

machine. For exercising the second op-

tion, first disable the LRS DHCP server,

from the Webmin 'System/Bootup and

shutdown' module. Click on 'dhcp3-

server' and deactivate the 'Start at boot

time' option. Now, on your existing

DHCP server, add a few DHCP options in

the client addresses’ pool, with your

usual DHCP server configuration

interface. Set the ‘filename’ to ’/tftp-

boot/revoboot/bin/ revoboot.pxe’. It

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��

List of backup images that you can directly burn to a CD/DVD or configure it so that a

user can directly restore their workstation over the network via PXE booting

enterprise implementation_linux rescue box_final.qxp 10/20/2007 9:44 PM Page 68

sets the network boot program to load the

said file. This option is also usually avail-

able as ‘BootFileName' under 'Option

DHCP 67’.

Then, set 'next-server' to the IP ad-

dress of your LRS. It is usually available

as ‘Boot Server Host Name' under 'Option

DHCP 66’. Here, give IP address of your

LRS and filename as /tftpboot/revoboot/

bin/revoboot.pxe. If you don’t have a

DHCP server, then you can use the rescue

server‘s DHCP feature.

In order to configure DHCP on this

server itself, go to the DHCP form from its

Web interface and select ’DHCP server‘.

Just give the name of the DHCP server

here and leave other fields as default and

scroll down to the Add pools option. Click

on this and specify the IP address range

for the DHCP and Apply the changes.

Now, click on ‘Start DHCP’. This will start

the DHCP server on your network, which

will also act as TFTP server.

Taking backups For taking backup, just boot a worksta-

tion from its network card using PXE

boot. On boot, you will get a text-based

menu. Select ’Add a client’. Now, you will

be asked for client-name and password,

give ’root’ as the client-name and pass-

word as ’linbox’. On successful login, you

will get another boot menu which lets

you launch the system backups and

restorations. Select the option ’Image

creation shared’. This will connect the

machine to the Linux rescue server

where all backup images are kept. It will

automatically start taking the backup of

machines and once the backup process is

over the machines are automatically

made to shutdown.

Managing backupsOnce the backup is taken as an image,

next step is to configure the image in

such a way that remote workstations

can be restored back, easily. In order to

do this, open the administrative console

of LRS using a Web browser and go to

‘System backup>Image’.

Here, you will be shown the layout of

your boot menu and below that you will

see the list of backup images (local or

shared) that you have taken. You can ei-

ther burn these images on a CD/DVD, or

alternatively, you can move the backup

images to the boot menu. This way,

when a user workstation is booted from

PXE, the backup image is shown in the

boot menu and the user can restore back

his/her machine just by selecting the

backup image name, from the boot

menu. The restoration would be done di-

rectly from the LRS system over the net-

work.

If you want to create a CD/DVD out

of the backup image, just click on

Burn icon given next to the backup im-

age. The system will first create an ISO

image of the entire backup and then you

can either burn ISO images directly on

that system or you can later on

download the ISO image and burn it on

the system where you have a CD

writer. If you want to move the backup

image to boot menu, then go to the im-

age file and click on the upward arrow

icon given in the ’To menu’ option. This

will move the image file into the list of

boot menu.

Then from the Web interface, select

the ’Boot menus’ tab and you will see

the backup image that you have moved

has come into the boot menu list. Click

on Apply button to reflect the changes

in the boot menu.

Now when the client workstation

boots from the PXE, the boot menu will

also contain the name of the image file

that we have configured above. By se-

lecting that image, the restoration

process will be triggered and the work-

station will be restored back to its origi-

nal state.

This is only one of the useful fea-

tures of Linbox that we have demon-

strated in this article. There are so many

other useful features like inventory

management, file backup etc, that

you can explore yourself.



File name: client.conf

��

This is the menu option that users see when they boot their machines using PXE. This

is where users can see the images of their machines for restoring or burning to a CD

enterprise implementation_linux rescue box_final.qxp 10/20/2007 9:45 PM Page 69



Keep an Eye on Your CodeSubversion is an Open Source software that keeps track of the changes done to software code by different

developers. In case of conflict, unwanted changes can be revoked

In software companies, a code is devel-

oped in parts by different software de-

velopers. The code that is finally

optimized and delivered to the client is

more or less an assimilation of the isolated

code generated by these developers. As

these different packets pass through dif-

ferent levels, chances of inadvertent er-

rors creeping in become high. So it is

necessary to keep track of the code and en-

sure that unwanted mistakes can be re-

verted back without hassles. To ensure

this as well as improve the speed at which

documents are processed, you need a soft-

ware utility that can keep track of all this

and notify developers in case the same line

is edited by more than one developer. Sub-

version is one such Open Source and free

tool that is conceptually very similar to

Concurrent Version Control (CVS). It con-

sists of a repository of data located at the

server and a copy for the required docu-

ment kept at the user end, known as local

copy. Whenever someone wants to edit the

content of the document, he edits the lo-

cal copy, keeping the original copy intact.

After the changes have been done, the

copy stored on the repository is updated.

A good thing about this software is that

unlike CVS, the tool commits the changes

only if the entire commit process is com-

pleted or else it doesn’t. This helps in situ-

ations when a network failure occurs

while committing changes. In this article

we show you how to implement, configure

and use this version control system.

Installation & configuration For implementing subversion, one has to

install Apache 2.0, Subversion 1.4.5 and

Tortoise SVN on the system. You can get

the Apache 2.0 installation file from

Apache website and the rest from the link:

http://svnbook.red-bean.com/. Apache,

we all know is a Web server, Subversion is

the tool that will take care of the entire

version control system and Tortoise SVN

is a subversion client that provides graph-

ical interface to the user who will be us-

ing this version control system. Installing

these three tools is pretty simple; all of

them come with an easy to use installer

for Windows.

After you have installed these, a bit of

tweaking is needed to get things going.

Navigate to the Subversion folder

through Windows Explorer, generally

found under ‘C:\Program files\.’ Copy the

files ‘/httpd/mod_dav_svn.so’ and

‘mod_authz_svn.so’ to Apache’s module

folder found under ‘C:\Program

files\Apache group\apache2\.’ Also copy

‘/bin/libdb43.dll’ file to Apache Module

directory. Open up Apache configuration

file ‘httpd.conf,’ which can be found

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In the ‘Working copy’ folder, you can check the status of documents that have been

updated on the repository

Enterprise Implementation-Version Control_final.qxp 10/23/2007 11:09 PM Page 68

under Apache directory and look for the

following lines:

#LoadModule dav_fs_module mod-

ules/mod_dav_fs.so

#LoadModule dav_module

modules/mod_dav.so

If these lines are marked as com-

ments, then remove the ‘#’ character.

This is done so that whenever Apache

server starts, these modules are loaded

along. Further, add the following lines at

the end of the ‘LoadModule Section’ in

Apache’s configuration file:

LoadModule dav_svn_module

modules/mod_dav_svn.so

LoadModule authz_svn_module mod-

ules/mod_authz_svn.so

Now configure Apache so that it can

handle the Subversion client, ie Tortois-

eSVN request and the URL that is should

use for Subversion repository. Open the

Apache configuration file and add the fol-

lowing lines at the end of the file:

<Location /svn>

DAV svn

SVNListParentPath on

SVNParentPath D:\SVN

AuthType Basic

AuthName "Subversion repositories"

AuthUserFile passwd

#AuthzSVNAccessFile svnaccessfile

#Require valid-user

</Location>

For simplicity, we have ignored the

line ‘Require valid-user,’ which is basi-

cally used for user authentication when-

ever someone wants to access the

repository. The first line tells Apache that

Subversion repository is available

through the following URL; ‘http:

//<server name or IP> /svn/’. The path

to the repository is specified on the 4th

line of the code provided above. So, if the

repository is in ‘svn’ directory, which is

under D: drive, then the path will be

‘D:\SVN’.

Working with SubversionTo get working with this version control

tool one has to create at least one reposi-

tory. A repository is a place where elec-

tronic data is stored and maintained for a

specific purpose. For creating the reposi-

tory, create a folder in D: drive and name

it as ‘svn’. Right click on the newly cre-

ated folder and select TortoiseSVN > Cre-

ate Repository here. It will ask ‘select the

type of repository you want to create.’ In

our case we chose BDB. Once the reposi-

tory is created, one can see different files

inside the ‘svn’ folder. These are configu-

ration and settings files, so please don’t

edit them or else it’ll give errors.

After the repository has been created,

one needs to import data to the reposi-

tory. But before that, one should organize

the repository so that data can be main-

tained easily later on. Most of the organ-

izations use three different directories to

maintain the development cycle. The first

is the ‘trunk’ directory that contains the

final version of each code or document,

second is ‘branches’ which contains the

copies that are distributed among devel-

opers to work on and the third is ‘tags’

which contains the tagged copies. For

better understanding of subversion we

will create only one folder, named ‘repo.’

Importing data to the repository is

pretty simple. Create a new folder on the

desktop and name it ‘test.’ Copy the file

which you want to add to the repository

to this newly created folder. For example,

we copied six different text files to this

folder. After this, right click on the



��

To update changes, made to the local copy of a document, on the repository, right

click on ‘working copy’ folder and click on ‘Update to revision’


‘test’ folder, go to Tortoise SVN > Import.

A dialog box opens up asking the URL of

the repository where you will be import-

ing files. Provide the URL and click on ‘Ok’

to add up the files. TortoiseSVN then im-

ports the complete directory tree includ-

ing all files to the repository.

To obtain a working copy on your sys-

tem you need to do a ‘checkout’ from the

repository, which means you need to get

the working copies from the repository to

your system. For this create a folder and

name it is as ‘Working Copy.’ Right click

on the newly created folder and go to Tor-

toiseSVN > Checkout. A ‘Checkout’ dia-

log will appear asking the URL of the

repository, where you can also see the

path to ‘Checkout Directory’. Click on

‘Ok’ to get working copies. In the next

window it will show the files and folders

that are being copied to the ‘Working

Copy’ folder and the final status. Now the

files that you want to work with are in the

‘Working Copy’ folder.

After one has finished working on a

particular file, the changes should be

made to the repository as well. Before

committing or making the change to the

repository, one should check whether the

copy he or she has is up-to-date or not. For

this, right click on the ‘Working Copy’

folder and go to TortoiseSVN > Update. If

the copy you have is up-to-date then there

will be no conflict and you can commit

the changes. For this, right click on the

same folder and go to TortoiseSVN >

Commit.

A conflict occurs when more than two

people change the same line in a document

or a code. Now this tool doesn’t know any-

thing about the document or the devel-

oper’s code that has been modified, as it

doesn’t understand what is right and what

is wrong. To check yourself, open up the

document which has conflict and you’ll

notice the conflict area marked as:

<<<<<<< filename

your changes

=======

code merged from repository

>>>>>>> revision

So, wherever any conflict happens,

this version control tool generates three

different file into the ‘Working Copy’

folder: one is your current working copy;

the second is the older version of your

working copy, i.e. the copy

before your last update; and the

third is the copy that has just been

received from the repository, ie

after you’ve updated the current

working copy.

To solve this conflict, open the ‘Con-

flict Editor.’ For this, right click on the file

that shows conflict and go to TortoiseSVN

> Edit Conflict. Make the necessary

changes to the code, ie retain the lines

that you feel are right and delete the ones

that are useless. After you’ve done the

modifications, save the file. For this, right

click on the modified file and go to Tortois-

eSVN > Resolved. Finally, save the

changes to the repository.

Use the TortoiseMerge tool to simultaneously view changes made to different ver-

sions of the code by different developers

�

In Log Messages, you can view the time and date of changes made by different devel-

opers on a particular software code






Host Intrusion Detection with OSSECMaintaining the integrity of a machine is a problem that can be dealt with by using techniques such as HIDS.

In this article we talk about the feature-rich, open source OSSEC-HIDS and how you can implement it

With an increase in number of

attacks, system breaches,

and software exploits

within an enterprise, integrity of the

system is a concern. This problem is

further compounded by tools that can

delete traces of an attacker. HIDS (Host

based intrusion detection) is one popu-

lar technique used for intrusion

detection. Here, we look at the imple-

mentation of an open source HIDS

called OSSEC-HIDS, which can

detect rootkits, perform file integrity

checking, log analysis, and registry

monitoring.

On the feature front, this solution

provides time based alerts and active

response components. It supports both

standalone and server-agent models for

Linux/Unix, but doesn’t support stand-

alone monitoring on a Windows

machine. This is because one can’t

install its server on Windows. After

detecting an attack, its active response

component either automatically blocks

the attacking machine or executes a

specified script/program. Its log analy-

sis has support for Apache, ISS, Squid,

event logs, Snort etc. and it automati-

cally analyzes the content of log files.

If an odd entry is detected, it

immediately sends an alert.

OSSEC ArchitectureThe architecture of this solution is a

simple Server-Agent architecture as

shown in the figure below. It uses

ossec-syscheckd daemon for monitoring

the file for changes at the server as well

as the agent end. The ossec-syscheckd

also keeps track of the file’s (the one that

is being monitored) md5sum, date, file

permissions etc. The ossec-logcollector

daemon on the agent collects logs,

passes them to the ossec-agentd which

in turn passes logs as well as details of all

events through encrypted traffic to

ossec-remoted running on the server.

All events are then passed to ossec-

analysisd, which decodes and analyzes

the logs and all other events. All active

responses are handled by ossec-execd

and email alerts are handled by ossec-

maild, both running at the server end.

Installation To install the OSSEC server, download

the ossec-hids-latest.tar.gz file from the

URL mentioned in the Direct Hit Box.

It can only be installed on a Linux/Unix

machine. Now, untar and unzip the

package by using the following

command:

tar -zxvf ossec-hids-latest.tar.gz

Now, go to the location where you

have extracted the package and execute

the installation script by using the

command:

# ./install.sh

The script will now ask the kind of

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OSSEC-HIDS Architecture

AGENT

syscheckd

(daemon to

monitor host)

.

.

.

logcollector

(daemon to

collect logs)

logcollector

remoted

(daemon for

active

response

forwarding )

execd

maild (daemon

for generating

email alerts)

syscheckd

analysisd

(event analysis,

enforces configura-

tion and rules,

generates alerts)

execd

(daemon for

managing

responses)

agentd

(event forward-

ing and sends

server notifica-

tions )

SERVER

OSSEC-HIDS uses seven daemons to communicate between server and agent

enterprise implementation- ossec hids.qxp 10/22/2007 10:06 PM Page 68

installation that you want, type ‘server’

and proceed. Further it will ask if you

want email notifications. Say ‘yes’ and

provide the email address. Next define

the component that you want to run:

integrity check daemon, rootkit detec-

tion, and active response. To run all of

them at once type ‘Y’. Once, the instal-

lation is done, to start OSSEC-HIDS run

the command below:

# /var/ossec/bin/ossec-control start

Once, the OSSEC server gets started,

it will automatically start monitoring

your server. To monitor other servers

and hosts in the network install agents

on them. Installing agents on Windows

is simple, just download the .exe from

the OSSEC’s website and run it.

After installation, provide authenti-

cation key, to get agent authenticated by

the server. Authentication key is gener-

ated at the OSSEC server, but before gen-

erating a key, you’ve to add agents to it.

To do this, go to the location /var/os-

sec/bin on the machine that has OSSEC

server installed and then run the./man-

age_agents command. Now, to add an

agent, type ‘A’ and press Enter. Provide

the name of the agent, then provide the

IP address of the agent and lastly an ID

for it. Now the script will ask you to con-

firm the information you provided. To

confirm press ‘Y’. Once the agent is

added, then to generate the key for the

agent, type‘E’ and press Enter. You will

now be able to see an agent menu where

you will find a list of all the agents that

you have added. Type in the ID of the

agent for which you want to generate

the key and the key will be generated.

Copy and paste this key manually to the

agent that you earlier installed on the

machine that you want to monitor. The

agent will get automatically authenti-

cated by the OSSEC server.

Configuring Web User Interface OSSEC’s WUI does not come integrated

with the core package. You have to

download its WUI package using the

‘http://www.ossec.net/files/ui/ossec-

wui-0.2.tar.gz’ link. Download it, untar

it, and move the extracted files to your

Web server directory say /var/www/os-

sec-wui. Now, go to the location where

you have kept the extracted files and to

start the WUI setup script run the

following command:

./setup.sh

After this, you need to add Web

server users (mostly Apache or www) to

OSSEC group. Then configure per

missions for the tmp directory and

for this run the commands written be-

low:

#chmod 770 /tmp

#chgrp apache /tmp

and then restart Apache. Your WUI

must be accessible at http: //<local-

host>/ossec-wui/.

Configuring rules for Windows monitoring After installing an agent on Windows,

you can also customize the rules for mon-

itoring. These rules are configured on OS-

SEC server. Once the server gets updated,

it will push the configured rules to the

agent. By default Windows policy moni-

toring files are present in the

/var/ossec/etc/shared directory. In the

directory you will find three files: win_ap-

plications_rcl.txt, win_audit _rcl. txt and

win_malware_rcl.txt. In win_applica-

tions_rcl.txt you will find the default

rules for detecting applications such as

Yahoo, Skype, Limewire, AOL, and

Kazaa. You can also add new application

rules to this file. For example you can cre-

ate rules for detecting gtalk and generate

alerts. For this, open the file with VI and

write the following command lines:

[Chat/IM - gtalk] [any] []

C:\Program Files\Google\Google



��

Before agent monitors the host, a specific key is to be generated on the server for

authentication, which is then manually entered on the agents

Enterprise Implementation- OSSEC HIDS.qxp 10/22/2007 9:59 PM Page 69

62 A CYBERMEDIA Publication

Toward a Well-connected EnterpriseToward a Well-connected Enterprise

Strategies for a Healthy WANStrategies for a Healthy WAN

PCQUEST N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 7

As organizations consolidate their data centers and provide remote access to their branch of-fices, the management of WAN infrastructure takes center stage.We surveyed key CIOs acrossthe country to find out how they were managing their WAN infrastructures, how were they optimizing their bandwith, what sort of clauses were they putting in their SLAs to manage service providers, and much more. In this story, we explore those responses and answers tosome key pain points in WAN management

Anil Chopra and Swapnil Arora

Cover Story

cover story-its wans and vpns_anil.qxp 10/24/2007 7:04 PM Page 16


Two key trends are fueling the WAN marketgrowth today. One is branch office automation,wherein organizations are trying to empower

their branches with IT. Second is IT infrastructure con-solidation, wherein organizations are moving awayfrom distributed computing and moving their entire ITinfrastructure in one central location. While this en-sures better manageability of the IT infrastructure, it

puts additional stress on the WAN connectivity. That’sbecause most of the processing takes place centrally,and branch offices require WAN connectivity to accesscentrally hosted applications.

Under such circumstances, CIOs must have a strat-egy to not only ensure availability of their WAN links,but also their bandwidth. Both these factors are equallyimportant. Availability can be managed in many ways:providing backup links, going for third party support tomonitor your links, and enforcing stringent SLAs toname a few. Ensuring bandwidth availability on theother hand is not a one-time process, but an ongoingone.

The third key issue is security, which becomesmore important when an organization uses the Internetto interconnect its various branch offices. The way outhere is by using VPNs. They can provide secure con-nectivity between both branch offices and HO, andeven between roaming mobile users and the HO.There’s a fourth aspect that’s extremely important aswell, of SLAs. They play an important role in not onlyensuring high availability of WAN links, but also ensur-ing bandwidth and QoS. There’s a lot more to SLAs, andwe’ll cover that subsequently.

So as one can well imagine, there are lots of issuesto be tackled when it comes to managing WAN linksand keeping them healthy. To do this story, we inter-acted with CIOs of key enterprises across the country.We tried to find answers to all the issues we just talkedabout and how were they handling them. As one couldwell imagine, it’s not an easy job and requires a well-planned strategy. In this story, we’ll talk about this inmore detail.

Identify and manage pain pointsThe first step in WAN management is to identif y thekey pain points with your existing WAN infrastructuresetup. Is it availability of your WAN links? Is it band-width, security, or something else? Let’s look at themone by one.

Link availabilityMore than 50% of our respondents found it to be some-what of an issue. Lack of availability in WAN links hap-pens only sometimes. This is possibly because amajority of them already have backup lines, whichtakes care of downtime. However this is not the only ��



solution. Companies could also outsource their WANmanagement to a third party, which will ensure that thelinks are always available. This is a good and cost effec-tive strategy to adopt for organizations with a largenumber of branches, like banks. That’s because itwould be unfeasible for them to hire manpower just tomanage their WAN links in their remote branch of-fices. It’s better to hire a third party and let them worryabout it. What the organization should do is implementthe right management solutions to keep track of itsWAN links. This would help in immediately identifyinglinks that are down, so that corrective measures can betaken. The other thing it should do is put in stringentSLAs that define the time period within which down-time would be tackled. We’ve seen situations where acomplete bank branch was unoperational for manyhours because its WAN links were down and there was

nobody available to fix it.

Give some basic training to branch staffAnother thing to do is to give some basic training to atleast one person in the branch on what to do should theWAN link fail. This doesn’t have to be a detailed tech-nology walk through. A few basic guidelines would suf-fice. For instance, the person should know where theWAN link is terminating in the branch office, and beable to identify the particular cable. In the case we justmentioned, the reason for downtime turned out to be apulled out WAN cable, possibly by the cleaning staffwhile cleaning in the morning. If the local person isgiven the basic knowledge to check for such things,downtime can be reduced.

One must keep in mind that in branch offices, thesekinds of practical situations can occur and therefore

should not be neglected.

Understand your bandwidth needsAnother critical pain point as far as WAN manag-ment goes is availability of bandwidth. One of thereasons for this can be the ISP, which can be tack-eld by putting in stringent SLAs. In fact, in our sur-vey, the overall satisfaction level of therespondents with the level of service offered bytheir service providers was quite high.

The bigger issue is judging your actual band-width requirements. How many applications arecurrently loading your WAN links, and how manymore applications are you likely to add in the fu-


How are your branch offices connected with HO?

No answer 4%

What measures have you taken to minimizedowntime of your WAN links?

No answer 6%

Have backup links63%

Have out-sourced WANmanagement toa third party 11%

Stringent SLAswith serviceprovider13%

Other 7%

Over private WANLinks37%

Over the Internet18%

A mix of both41%

Cover Story

Choice of WAN LinksA majority of the respondents said that they were usingprivate WAN links to interconnect their branch offices.Very few said they were using only Internet for branchoffice connectivity, and the remaining were using a mixof both private as well as Internet links.Interestingly, none of the respondents who were usingthe Internet for WAN links were doing any sort of WANoptimization; and just about everybody over privatelinks was either using a WAN Optimizer or doing somesort of QoS or bandwidth prioritization for their appli-cations. Most of the organizations having more than100 branch offices were using private WAN links.

��


ture? Are your WAN links geared to handlethe additional load? As infrastructure consoli-dation and data center centralization is becom-ing a trend, you’ll be running moreapplications over your WAN links. Is yourservice provider geared to provide you morebandwidth as and when you add more applica-tions? This may not be much of an issue in caseof a large service provider offering you con-nectivity in your head office. The serviceprovider could give you Bandwidth on De-mand facilities, allowing you to scale up asmuch as you need and charge you only for theduration when you really used it. The troubleagain comes in branch offices. Is the local serviceprovider for your branch office geared to provide morebandwidth? Again, we’ve seen cases where the serviceprovider is just not able to offer this facility.

Even if a WAN service provider does promise such

facility, then the next thing you must check is how longwould the service provider take to upgrade your band-width. Would the service provider offer Bandwidth onDemand, or would there be a bureaucratic process ofapplying for additional bandwidth?

How many service providers?The interesting thing we found in oursurvey was that a majority of the re-spondents were using two serrviceproviders. However, there were a sig-nificant 28% of them who were usingthree to four service providers.Yourchoice of a service provider dependsupon a number of things. One ofcourse is reach. Is your serviceprovider able to offer you connectivityacross all your branch offices? Evenif the service provider is, then the nextquestion is related to availability. Is

How many service providers are you using for your WANconnectivity?

How satisfied are you with the service offered byyour WAN service provider(s)?

No answer 2%

One22%

Two37%

Three 13%

Four 15%

60%

40%

20%

0%

1 Not satisfied

Highly satisfied

2 3

4 5

Other 11%

Cover Story%

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it worth risking giving your complete WAN infrastruc-ture to a single service provider? What if the serviceprovider’s links were to fail? How many redundantpaths does the provider have to ensure that your con-nectivity doesn’t get hampered? In some cases, it mightmake sense to go with more than one. Some companieswe know of have outsourced the complete WAN infra-structure management to a single service provider. Theservice provider in turn ties up with other serviceproviders to offer redundancy, availability, etc.

B/W Optimization AppliancesWAN optimization has been one the most talked abouttecnologies for the past year. It is basically a collectionof techniques to enhance the performance of applica-tions over your WAN. A WAN optimization applianceuses a combination of various techniques like compres-sion, TCP optimization, WAFS, caching, SSL accelera-tion, etc. Strangely, despite all the hype, we didn’t get avery enthusiastic response on using WAN optimizationappliances. In our survey only 15% of respondents saidthey were planning to deploy a WAN optimization solu-tion in near future, while 47% said they had no plans ofdoing so at all. Those who had deployed such solutionsdid manage to save bandwidth. About 13% of the respon-dents said that they had managed to save 20--30% of theirbandwidth, while another 10% saved 30--40% after de-ploying a WAN optimizer. Most of the bandwidth shap-ing is achieved through policy-driven approach i.e. youcan limit which users, or application or an IP can con-

sume how much bandwidth in a particulartime.

Before deploying a WAN optimizationsolution it’s very important to what exactlyis going on your WAN. If you are accessingERP or SAP application over the WAN, youmight be better off deploying a ApplicationAccelerator than WAN optimizer.

WAN optimization has also made a markin DR, as an enterprise needs to backuphuge volumes of data every day at a remotelocation through a WAN. Again, to handlemany enterprises deploy large WAN linksbetween the remote DR site and data cen-ter. In many cases data replication cannotbe postponed to non-peak hours andbackup has to be performed every hour or

so. WAN optimization appliances improve the time taken

to transfer data by using techniques like data reduction,where appliance constantly monitors data flowing acrossand if it encounters repetitive data, it will provide it lo-cally. By reducing the amount of repetitive data sent,WAN traffic is significantly reduced.

In Compression, appliance uses a common compres-sion algorithm to remove extra information from the traf-fic before it is transmitted. The information isreconstituted at the destination using that same algo-rithm and there is no synchronization between two ends.With this technique data transmitted over WAN is re-duced link, but has limitations on how much bandwidthreduction it can achieve by itself–-and has minimal im-pact on latency. Another commonly used technique iscaching in which at both ends data transmitted is in-spected and the appliance stores all duplicate data lo-


How difficult is an issue defining SLAs with yourWAN service provider?

Have you ever faced a breach of SLA by your WANservice provider?

50%

40%

30%

20%

10%

0%1

Not Difficult

% R

espo

nses

Very Difficult

4% 9%

41%

22%

7%

2 3 45

No 59%

Yes 37%

No Answer 4%

Cover Story

��


in improving the response time of applications.

Other Optimization TechniquesWAN optimization appliances have just come,but companies have been following other tech-niques to optimze their bandwidth. On top of thelist in our survey was Continuous monitoring ofWAN traffic and usage of policies for Bandwidthprioritization, access control, and policy rout-ing. Some respondents even said that creatinguser awareness worked well for them.

SLA ManagementTo achieve acceptable levels of quality, uptime,latency, packet loss, SLAs play an importantrole. In our survey, a large number of respon-dents found it difficult to define SLAs with theirservice providers. Guaranteed uptime andpenalty for downtime were the top two itemsthat must be addressed in a SLA agreement.Many respondents said SLAs should have real-istic parameters for e.g. if a branch office is inremote geographic location with limited con-nectivity, then most WAN service providers willshy away from uptime clause in such a situation.Others must have clauses including last milesupport, response time, escalation matrix, andclear definition of problem resolving timeframe,followed by penalties if not met.

About 37% of the respondents in our surveysaid that they have faced a breach of SLA withtheir WAN service provider while 59% werehappy customers. When asked how did theydeal with breach in SLA, most respondentssaid discussions with service providers weregood enough to resolve the issue while somesaid they asked service providers for compen-sation. When asked what was nature of thebreach, a part of respondents refused to dis-close, while some said that the serviceprovider was ‘ not able to meet committed up-time.’ Other responses included poor per-formance, packet loss, and slow responsetime.

VPN ConnectivitySecurity becomes extremely important when


We’re using both site-to-site and access VPN 22%

15%

44%

15%

4%

8%

0%

48%

9%

24%

11%

We’re using access VPN for mobile users

We’re using site-to-site VPN

We don’t have VPN connectivity

No answer

Others

Other 13%

Security22%

Bandwidth fluctuations leadto performance issues

52%

No answer13%

VoIP

Our core business applications

Web

Email

No answer

Are you using VPN connectivity in your enterprise?If so, what type?

Which applications are you accessing over yourVPN?

What’s the key challenge you’re facing with yourVPN connectivity?

Cover Story

��


organizations avail Internet for WAN connectivity. Insuch cases, VPN is one option to consider. In our sur-vey, 44% of the respondents said that they were usingonly site-to-site VPNs, while another 22% said they wereusing both site-to-site and access VPN for mobile users.Another 15% were not using VPN at all. About 48% ofthe respondents were using VPNs to access their corebusiness applications while email and web were theother two applications being accessed via VPN.

The biggest issue that CIOs seem to be facing inVPNs is bandwidth fluctuations, which lead to perform-ance issues. This is an even bigger issue than security,which came as the second most important issue, but farbehind the first one.

Types of VPNIPSec VPN: initially developed for site-to-site connec-tivity, it is now largely used by the enterprises in needof extra security and those who have geographicallydispersed employees. IPSec VPNs are mostly used inaddition to MPLS VPNS, works complementary toMPLS VPNs. IPSec allows establishment of a VPN viaInternet and can provide secure gateway to gateway

and host to gateway connections. IPSEC encryptspackets before transmissions and also validates data byauthentication of the source sending the packets.

A recent development in IPSec is DMVPNs (Dy-namic Multipoint VPN). In this using IPSec dynamictunnels can be created as and when required betweenSpoke-to-Spoke or Hub-to-Spoke. Direct spoke-to-spoke connection means two branch offices can com-municate with each other, without any traffic going toHO. It only modifies the configuration files of IPSec tun-nel not the whole tunnel.

SSL VPNSSL VPNs are deployed in Client-less environment andmostly used for connecting roadwarriors to the office. Itworks well when you don’t have much control over theend devices. In our survey ' these many ' respondentssaid they are using VPNs for connecting roadwarriors tothe corporate network. With SSL Enterprises you canlimit access to specific resources, web applications etc.SSL at times is also used with IPsec.

Overall WAN mgmt is becoming increasingly criticalfor organizations, and requires constant attention.


�

F5 WANJet WANJet operates at layer 4 and usesSession Matrix technology to deliv-er LAN like performance over theWAN. It can accelerate applicationssuch as file transfer, client-servercore business applications, datareplication, email, etc. It also sup-ports site-to-site SSL encryption,TCP optimization, QoS traffic shap-ing, and application proxy supportfor CIFS.

Blue CoatBlue Coat's ProxySG WANoptimization applianceprovides Internet securityfunctions such as web fil-tering, logging, web anti-virus, spyware blocking,and peer-to-peer blocking.As a result organizationscan consolidate WAN opti-mization and web securityinto one appliance.

Silver PeakSilver Peak NX is a WAN accel-eration solution. It uses tech-niques like data reduction, com-pression, QoS, hardware levelIPSec Encryption, and loss mit-igation to provide high WANspeeds. It operates at networklayer of ISO stack. It uses disk-based data reduction forincreasing performance andsuperior memory retention.

Cover Story

A few WAN Optimization Appliances



Software applications are the backbone of any organiza-

tion’s commercial activities. Irrespective of size, each

company depends on various software applications to

accomplish every aspect of their business in today’s global

world. Companies invest millions on implementing the best

possible enterprise software in their premises. But soon after

deployment, unless applications are managed continuously, it

can lead to downtime, causing business loss.

Rising complexity intensifies the challenge of optimizing

application performance. Enterprise application management

brings its own share of complex issues and challenges, the

sheer abundance of them being the most pertinent. With IT

teams juggling demands of hundreds of internally imple-

mented applications, it is not easy to manage and utilize them

to the optimum level. Importantly once an application has

been deployed it is costly and also difficult to make material

changes to the application.

The ultimate result is that while enterprise applications

continue to become more important to the operation of the

business, issues with their performance become more preva-

lent and difficult to identify, and resolve. Recognizing the im-

portance of proper monitoring and management of

applications, we will focus on some of the best available tools

for application management and performance monitoring

HHooww ttoo KKeeeepp yyoouurr AApppplliiccaattiioonnss HHeeaalltthhyyHHooww ttoo KKeeeepp yyoouurr AApppplliiccaattiioonnss HHeeaalltthhyy

Rahul Sah, Rakesh Sharma and Saurangshu Kanunjna

Enterprise Solutions

enterprise implementation_app mgmt_final.qxp 10/23/2007 10:35 PM Page 68

and also tell you some of the best practices for application man-

agement.

An application monitoring tool can be a piece of software

or an appliance that continuously monitors, diagnoses and in-

forms about problems that slow down applications you are

running.

Application performance relates to the speed as in how fast

transactions are completed or the information that is getting

delivered to the end user by the application via a particular net-

work, application and Web services infrastructure. The idea

here is to detect and resolve the problem before users start ex-

periencing any difficulties or poor performance.

Database optimization toolsWith increasing size of data, databases tend to get sluggish

over time. Database optimization tools are used to improve

their performance. As the size of a database increases, it results

in a series of logs to be created; this in turn increases the over-

head. These tools try to do diagnostics for the database by re-

viewing parameters such as log, cache size and shared pool

size. Such tools help the DBA to tune up the performance of the

database along with the option of monitoring the database

and its space consumption for logs and buffer.

For performance tuning, these tools follow different algo-

rithms based on the type of database server. For eg, a tool

called, DB Tuning Expert for Oracle, tunes up the crucial pa-

rameters in Oracle to get optimal performance. Also by re-

claiming the unused space in data storage and by clearing up

the log file, database performance can be improved.

Web application optimization toolsWhenever Web application optimization is referred, most of us

confuse it with Web optimization appliances. But there are

software tools available that perform the same task. Cache con-

trol is one technique used by such tools for optimizing web

apps. Using cache control tools you can limit cache size, cre-

ate rules for objects residing in cache to be updated or deleted,

and synchronize cache memory spread across multiple

servers. HTTP Compression is one of the most popularly used

techniques for optimizing Web based apps over the WAN. It can

be done at Web server as well as browser level. At server level

you can either keep Web content in a pre-compressed format

or you can use a third party software to dynamically compress

the content.

Quest Management Suite for SQL Server DBAs now have to cope with ever increasing responsibilities of

managing the SQL Servers, as more and more business critical

application data gets stored on them. They have to meet the

challenge of managing the database environment that not

only increase in volume but also increase in complexity. The

Quest Management Suite is a set of tools that can help a DBA

to manage, monitor and diagnose problems on his SQL Server.

The suite consists of following:

● LiteSpeed, which is a backup and recovery tool.

● Capacity Manager, which is storage and resource

planning tool

● Spotlight, a real-time performance diagnostic tool.

Here we will focus on Spotlight and see how a DBA can

benefit from the performance monitoring of the SQL Server. ��





SpotlightA database administrator al-

ways tries to keep the database

up and running, but he can

never be sure about bottlenecks

that would hamper database

performance. In such a sce-

nario, using manual techniques

to diagnose and resolve the bot-

tleneck becomes hard for the

DBA. QuestSoftware’s Spotlight

on SQL Server is a tool that can

help a DBA in resolving such

bottlenecks, and also help him

to monitor the SQL Server, to

identify and eliminate the situ-

ations where such bottlenecks

could arise. Spotlight is a data-

base performance-monitoring

tool that allows a DBA to ob-

serve the actual database activ-

ity on a real time basis in a

graphical interface.

Configuration and useFor configuring Spotlight for the SQL Server, you have to spec-

ify a working database that would be used by Spotlight to main-

tain monitoring counters and logs. When the configuration

step has been completed, a DBA can create connections to the

SQL Server that Spotlight would

monitor for performance. On the

main screen, Spotlight presents a

graphical representation of activities

occurring amongst the components

of SQL Server. The DBA can view

components such as disk storage,

memory and SQL processes on the

main screen and also view data flow

rates amongst these components.

The representation of database

server activities by Spotlight is done

on a real-time basis. So, whenever

any bottleneck is about to occur, the

DBA monitoring the server over Spot-

light can determine the problem area

and resolve it even before the bottle-

neck takes effect.

Spotlight also does a calibration

process periodically that automati-

cally sets a baseline for the server-

The memory view of the server instance shows the buffer cache information along with

graphs for Hit Rates and Page Allocation on time scale

Spotlight shows the activities of disk, memory and SQL processes in real-time for perform-

ance monitoring. Also the I/O speed is tracked for logical and physical data reads

��



based on performance parame-

ters such as Cache Hit Ratio, La-

tency Period, etc. This allows it to

set the speed of internal data flow

and other activity counters like

cache size, log buffer size, etc.

When this threshold gets crossed,

it sends an alert upon which the

DBA can take appropriate action.

The Buffer Cache Hit Ratio

shows the percentage of the logi-

cal reads satisfied by the data al-

ready in Buffer Cache. The DBA

had to calculate these ratios

through some SQL queries or

through native tools earlier, but

with Spotlight he can have this in-

formation on real-time basis. This

is critical information, and as the

Hit Ratio goes down, the DBA can

increase or clear the cache to maintain performance.

Spotlight also offers the option of viewing status and

graphs for memory, SQL activities and database. Under Mem-

ory view, the buffer cache of each database object and the page

allocation can be monitored. The SQL Activity view shows the

current response time for data queries, Cache Hit rates and

CPU utilization information in graphical format. Spotlight also

maintains an Error log, which can be used to pinpoint the rea-

son for any server bottleneck. The DBA can also keep record of

how many active sessions are there to the server and how many

users are currently accessing the server. Spotlight is an impor-

tant tool for a DBA to keep the database server up and running,

by eliminating bottlenecks before they can happen.

Chroniker AppWatch At times system administrators receive the message that an

application is taking more than the required time to respond

even though the database and application are running fine.

Hence, it becomes difficult to identify where actually the appli-

cation is taking time to respond.

Chroniker AppWatch provides you with a solution for the

same. It’s a performance testing software that allows you to

monitor the application, tells you its response time and what

the end user experience is. Using this software, one can easily

find the exact point where the application is taking time. For

example, does it take time to load the application or is it taking

time in querying the database. It also provides you with ‘analy-

sis reports’ such as SLA reports. It automatically generates re-

ports such as the ‘n’ slowest tasks per month, 10 least available

tasks per month, etc.

The interesting fact about this software is that it can simu-

late the real user behavior. It automatically finds icons on the

With the help of AppWatch one can view the error message, which will be exactly what the

user will be facing

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��




desktop even if the position of the icon is changed, as it cap-

tures and recognizes a Windows object just as a human does.

Also when a Web page is getting loaded, you can configure the

software to wait until the page is fully loaded so that a partic-

ular action can be taken, such as putting search string after the

required text box is loaded completely. Moreover, its user

friendly interface lets you design test suites without having

prior scripting knowledge.

Here, we show how it can be done. Before starting the de-

sign of the test suite, one has to note down what steps will

evolve during the test. For example, to open a particular appli-

cation you have to find the respective shortcut on the desktop

and then double click on it. For writing the test suite, open up

the ‘Scenario Builder’ form and Start > All Programs >

Chroniker > Scenario Station.

For convenience, we will load an already written script,

which can be found under the ‘script’ directory named ‘Nrg-

Website.csc.’ Save it by another name say ‘IExplorer.’ Now for

Following best practices provide a frame-work for achieving results efficiently. Right now application performance man-agement is more of reactive trou-bleshooting than proactive. So when anapplication slowdown is reported, the ITstaff determines the cause behind theproblem and tries to minimize the oper-ational and business impact from theslowdown. However, there are measuresthat can be taken to make the process ofapplication management more proactive.Here are a few practices that can be

adopted: Step 1: Baseline- Under normal condi-tions both network and individually crit-ical applications should be baselined todetermine performance parameters.Whenever an application performanceproblem is reported, the baseline can in-stantly offer data for comparison.Step 2: Application Flow Analysis- Thisinvolves analyzing the application duringthe flow level, i.e. during an applicationconversation, as opposed to packet leveland then presenting the summary statis-

tic on the most important aspects of itsperformance. Hence, by interpretingflow-level data into actionable informa-tion it helps maximize efficiency and min-imize response time. Step 3: Categorizing and isolating theproblem – It’s important to first under-stand the type of problem and then cate-gorize it for isolation. There can beseveral reasons for the problem, hencecategorization is important.

Causes for trouble can be applicationcode, which if written inefficiently is

Best Practices in Application Management

Using the Chroniker AppWatch browser interface one can remotely keep track of all the scenarios including the overall status




using this test suite remotely, one needs to register it to

‘Chroniker base’. For this, go to Tools menu and then click on

‘Register Scenario’. Now open Internet Explorer on any other

computer which is attached to the same network and open the

page http://<ip-address>:8888/, where ‘<ip-address>’ is the

IP of the system where Chroniker software is installed. When

the Web page gets loaded, navigate to Modules > Applications.

Here, all scenarios are listed along with the number of trans-

actions they have and their status. Moreover, when an applica-

tion fails to execute, you can view the screen shot of the page

where the error has occurred.

To run the scenario immediately, click on ‘Run this sce-

nario now’ icon on the row where scenarios are listed. A win-

dow will appear which will show you results such as response

time, after executing the scenario.

End user measurementA key concern for any organization is effective maintenance

of applications so that the end user doesn’t face any problems

while using them. To maintain high level of online service

quality, organizations must adopt an application and service

management strategy that helps companies ensure that end

users receive the best possible experience while using them.

Some key areas must be addressed from the user perspective

are: capabilities to measure application performance and user

experience; and understanding of the usage level, usage pat-

tern, and content analysis, right down to the individual user

level. Like wise, there can be several other methods to deter-

mine key parameters of an application from an end-user per-

spective. For eg, user performance measurement can enable

real time monitoring of user activities and individual user ac-

tivity can be analyzed for problem detection and diagnosis for

quick resolution. Live Session Capture and Replay helps to

capture, search and store each end user’s actual Web

experience.

One can track what a user did and how the system re-

sponded. Report on the service level of synthetic transaction

by business processes, geographic location or time period is

again one of the key methods to understand the end user per-

spective. Another key point is capacity determination so as to

identify bottlenecks such as ineffective load balancing and

poorly performing servers.

Understanding the end user perspective and managing the

same result in several benefits for the organization, such as

maximizing application productivity or profit potential by un-

derstanding user behavior, think-time and navigation path.

Also you can learn how your users are using the application

through usage reports and trend analysis. By optimizing the

application potential you will be enhancing overall user expe-

rience. Another key benefit is the practice of proactive service

level management by aligning IT service delivery to initia-

tives and goals.

bound to create a negative impact, irre-spective of whether the application istransactional or streaming in nature orperforms bulk file transfer. The problemwill be evident if monitored by an appli-cation management system. Anothercause for the problem could be networkinfrastructure.

Before application performancemanagement solutions came into pic-ture, inadequate bandwidth was consid-ered to be the primary cause of poorapplication performance. But now withcompanies investing significantly onbandwidth improvement it has beenclearly found out that this doesn’t have

any connection with poor applicationperformance.

Another reason for the problemcould be understanding of protocols. Attimes inefficient network protocol is be-hind an application performance prob-lem. An application performancemanagement tool can help determinesuch kind of issues and facilitate betterunderstanding of how a protocol works.This in turn helps developers to tune theprotocol, making it better for the appli-cation.

Sometimes an underpoweredserver, outdated operating system,clients running unauthorized software,

or cycle – consuming activities such asunscheduled backups, can also be thesource of slow application performance.Application performance tools can iden-tify this problem and intimate the IT staffabout the same.

The advanced application manage-ment solution allows taking data whichthey generate and convert them into amore illustrated, comprehensive reportwhich helps the IT team to maintain atrack record of the behavior of certainapplications. These in turn help themunderstand the applications and deviceproper maintenance schedule depend-ing on their behavior.

�


Developer


Implementing Ajax with ZKThe ZK framework allows you to create Ajax-based Web applications, without even requiring to write complexJavaScript.We’ll create a web application and integrate it with business logic in this article

Rahul Sah

With the advent of Web 2.0, the

Web browser has become a

platform for delivering busi-

ness applications to users and we have ably

matched the functionalities that only thick

client software could exhibit.

The benefits of delivering applications

over the Web rather than distributing them

as stand-alone desktop applications are

aplenty, but for that we need to write com-

plex client-side JavaScripts.

Ajax technology, as part of Web 2.0,

came as a boon to developers to create dy-

namic and responsive interfaces, but writ-

ing JavaScripts was still an overhead.The

answer to this problem comes as ZK, which

is an Open Source Ajax framework that

allows Java Web developers to create rich

Web applications, quite easily.

ZK frameworkZK’s Ajax engine consists of both client

and server side components that commu-

nicate with each other.The framework

uses JavaScript but the complexity to im-

plement an Ajax framework has been con-

cealed from the Web developers.ZK has

two sets of interface components, one is

based on XUL (XML User interface Lan-

guage) and other is based on XUML (XML

User interface Markup Language).The

framework has been explained earlier in

the March ’07 issue of PCQuest.

In this article, we will see how to develop a

Web application, using ZK framework and

how it can be integrated with business

logic.

ZK in actionOn this month’s PCQ Extreme DVD, we

have provided the RC 3 release of the ZK

framework.We will be using Eclipse as IDE

and Tomcat 5.5 as the Web server.

Create a new Web project, using Eclipse

and name it as ZKdemo.Extract the zk-

bin-3.0.0-RC.zip archive at ZK_DIR.Now,

copy the “z*”jar files from ZK_DIR/

dist/lib folder to your application’s WEB-

INF/lib folder.You would also be required

to import bsh.jar from ZK_DIR/

dist/lib/ext folder to your application’s

WEB-INF/lob folder.You can also import

commons-io.jar, if your application would

be using them to upload files.

We now have to register the ZK frame-

work engine with our Web application.The

ZK engine has servlets for ZK-based pages

and also to handle client-server communi-

cations.By inserting the following code

snippet into the web.xml file, we can regis-

ter the loader that evaluates ZK-based

pages and also do the mapping of .zul and

.zhtml pages to the servlet.

<servlet>

<servlet-name>zkLoader</servlet-name>

<servlet-class> org.zkoss.zk.ui.http.Dhtm-

lLayoutServlet </servlet-class>

<init-param>

<param-name>update-uri</param-name>

<param-value>/zkau</param-value>

</init-param>

<load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>

</servlet>

<servlet-mapping>


<url-pattern>*.zul</url-pattern>

</servlet-mapping>

<servlet-mapping>


<url-pattern>*.zhtml</url-pattern>

</servlet-mapping>

As Ajax does asynchronous com-

Applies To: Web developers

USP: Create rich user interfaces

for your applications

Primary Link: http://www.zkoss.

org/download/

Keywords: ZK Ajax framework

PCQ Extreme DVD: system/

DIRECT HIT!

ZK jars required by application are placed

in WEB-INF/lib folder ��

zk for java_final.qxp 10/23/2007 1:21 PM Page 76

Developer


munication between client and server, we

need to register the asynchronous update

engine for ZK , by inserting following code

snippet into web.xml of our Web app.

<servlet>

<servlet-name>auEngine</servlet-name>

<servlet-class>

org.zkoss.zk.au.http.DhtmlUpdate-

Servlet</servlet-class>

</servlet>

<servlet-mapping>

<servlet-name>auEngine</servlet-name>

<url-pattern>/zkau/*</url-pattern>

</servlet-mapping>

Now, we can head start with creating

our ZUML pages for our app.Create a new

file in the ZKdemo folder and name it as

hello.zul.Adding the following code snip-

pet will make our first page.The first line

sets the title for the browser window, while

the code after that creates a window titled

‘Hello’ within the HTML page.

<?page title="ZK try out"?>

<window title="Hello">

Hello ZK Demo Page!!!

</window>

To test our application, build and place

the war file in Tomcat’s webapps directory.

Start the Tomcat server (considering that

your server’s listening port is 8080) and go

to http:// localhost:8080/ ZKdemo/

hello.zul.

If all is well, that is if we’ve

successfully registered the ZK Ajax engine

in web.xml and imported all necessary jar

files required by the framework, then we

will see the Hello message on our browser.

Business logic integrationLet’s move ahead and bring some interac-

tion between our interface and the back-

end.Say, we have to display a list of cities

to our users for selection and we populate

that through a database.We will create a

Java Bean named City.java to represent the

city name.

public class City

{

private String _cityName;

public City(String cityName)

{_cityName = cityName;}

public String getCityName()

{ return _cityName; }

public void setCityName(String name)

{ _cityName = name; }

}

Now, we will create a manager for City

that will do Add and List operations for

the City instance and name it as CityMan-

ager.java.

public class CityManager

{

private List<City> _cities = new

LinkedList<City>();

public List<City> listCities() { return

_cities; }

public void addCity(City city) {

_cities.add(city); }

}

In this script, we will use a POJO

retrieved by a “Manager” object, which

will fetch and display the

list. If we were supposed to

use JavaScript, that process

would have been a bit com-

plex to fetch the list as Java

Collection object and iterat-

ing on that to produce the

list. But with ZK, we have a

‘forEach’ attribute to do the

iterations on the Cities and

display that list.

The following code snip-

pet does this task. Here we

have hard-coded the city

names into the City object by

using the addCity() method

of the manager, but in real application

scenarios, the object would be returning

the cities list from a database table.

<window>

<zscript>

import City;

import CityManager;

manager=new CityManager();

manager.addCity(new City("Calcutta"));

manager.addCity(new City("Mumbai"));

manager.addCity(new City("New Delhi"));

manager.addCity(new City("Raipur"));

cities = manager.listCities();

</zscript>

Select a City: <listbox mold="select">

<listitem forEach="${cities}"

label="${each.cityName}"

value="${each}"/>

</listbox>

</window>

The script for ZK is enclosed between

<zscript> tags. In the DVD, along with the

ZK binary, you’ll see that we’ve placed this

script in a tabbed window.The final page

layout has some examples displayed up

from the demo code that ZK provides.

Also it is advisable to download the devel-

opers guide from the site as a handy refer-

ence to ZK framework.

Tab1 shows the city list as a result of the script code

we created �

zk for java_final.qxp 10/23/2007 1:18 PM Page 77

Developer


In ASP.NET 2.0, we saw the introduc-

tion of a number of ‘smart’ controls –

like GridView, DetailsView, the Login

and Navigation Control Set, to name a few.

These allow developers to get productive

very quickly by providing a set of features

that are most commonly used in their spe-

cific scenario.For instance, by simply

dropping in a Login or CreateUserWizard

control onto a Web page, a developer could

start building in security features to the

site.Keeping the same tradition alive,

ASP.NET ‘Futures’ release – an upcoming

version of the popular ASP.NET program-

ming stack – has a number of new controls

as well. In this article, we take a look at the

new Dynamic Data controls.

One of the most common tasks in cre-

ating Web pages is displaying data from a

database in a table to the user. In ASP.NET

2.0, the GridView and SQLDataSource con-

trols were introduced that allowed devel-

opers to quickly create a table displaying

results of a query.However, in Dynamic

Data controls, even this has been dis-

pensed with.

All these controls work on the principle

of database schema directly.That is to say,

if you create Web pages that map directly

to objects in your database, you can get

the pages to work without writing any

CRUD level code at all. For instance, in

case you have a table called ‘authors’ in

your database and you create a new Web

page called ‘authors.aspx’ in your website,

you will automatically get a page that

contains all data manipulation features

for that table. But before we get into that,

let’s take a look at how to proceed.

If you have Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2

or above and have installed the ASP.NET

Futures stack, create a new website from

the Dynamic Data Web template. Open up

the Web.config of the site and in the

<connection-

Strings> section

add a connection

string to a database

on your machine.

Once this is done,

right click the solu-

tion and select ‘Add

New Item…’ In the

template box, in-

stead of selecting a

Web form, select

‘Dynamic Data Web-

form.’ Now name the

ASP.NET page based

on a table or view in

your database. For

instance, you can call it ‘authors.aspx’ if

there is a table called ‘authors.’

By default, the page contains a

Dynamic AutoData control. However, for

this case, delete the control and drop in a

Dynamic List control on the page. Press

Ctrl-F5 to run the page.When the

browser opens, you will see that the page

contains a GridView with sort, pagination

and edit/update functionality.And all

this without writing a single line of code.

On the page, drop in a Dynamic Details

control and refresh it in the browser.You

will see that the GridView now has a De-

tailsview also attached to it that displays-

details of the row selected.

We can now go ahead and add a

Dynamic Filter control on the page as well.

This control needs at least one property to

be set, called the ColumnName.This is the

column on which filtration will happen in

the Dynamic List control.You can also

change the appearance of the filter from

the default drop down to a radio or list as

well, by supplying the FilterType property.

For instance, to filter on a column called

contract and show it as radio buttons in-

stead of a drop down, the control would

look like this:

Dynamic Data Controls in ASP.NET FuturesThe ASP.NET Futures stack contains a new set of controls that can be used to create Web pages that can manipulate databases with even lesser code

Vinod Unny, Enterprise InfoTech

Applies To: Advanced .NET

developers

USP: Create Ajax enabled web-

sites on the fly

Primary Link: http://www.microsoft.

com/downloads/details.aspx?

Google Keywords: ASP.Futures

DIRECT HIT!

��

The output of the DynamicAutoData control. Note the name of

the ASPX page and the functionality that is offered

SERIES

PART III

VS 08

dynamic data controls in asp.net 'futures'_final.qxp 10/20/2007 9:05 PM Page 84


Developer

<asp:DynamicFilter ID="DynamicFilter1"

runat="server" ColumnName="contract"

FilterStyle="Radio" />

You can also create a RSS feed for

the data in the table for this page,

so that users can subscribe to be

informed of any changes in the table.

All you need to do is drop a Dynamic

RSS Link control on the page and sub-

scribe to the URL that it creates.

The Dynamic Data controls also let you

display a navigation menu of other dy-

namic data driven pages.Say you have

created a number of table manipulation

pages for different tables in your database.

Instead of statically linking them in every

page,drop in a Dynamic Navigator control

on the pages.These will then automatically

list the Dynamic Data pages in your site.

Customizing controlsYou can very easily customize the look and

feel of the output from controls by supply-

ing a template to them.For instance, in

case you wish to

customize the look of

the Dynamic List

control, simply supply a

template GridView, like

this:

<asp:GridView

ID="GridView1"

runat="server" Back-

Color="White"

BorderColor="#E7E7FF"

BorderStyle="None"

BorderWidth="1px"

CellPadding="3"

GridLines="Horizon-

tal">

<RowStyle Back-

Color="#E7E7FF" Fore-

Color="#4A3C8C" />

<PagerStyle Back-

Color="#E7E7FF" ForeColor="#4A3C8C" />

<SelectedRowStyle

BackColor="#738A9C"

ForeColor="#F7F7F7" />

<HeaderStyle BackColor="#4A3C8C"

Font-Bold="True" ForeColor="#F7F7F7" />

<AlternatingRowStyle

BackColor="#F7F7F7" />

</asp:GridView>

<asp:DynamicList ID="DynamicList1"

runat="server" ControlID="GridView1" />

Note that the ControlID property of

the DynamicList is set to the ID of the

GridView to use as a template.You can

do this for all other Dynamic controls as

well – DetailsView for Dynamic Details,

Hyperlink for Dynamic RSS, Menu for

Dynamic Navigator and so on.

Adding CodeMost of the controls have a number of

methods that can be used to customize the

output even further.For instance, the Dy-

namic List control by default returns all

the columns of the table.However to cus-

tomize the output, you can override a

method called GetColumns like this:

public override IEnumerable Get-

Columns()

{

return new object[]

{

new DynamicDataColumn

(

"Full Name",

delegate { return EvalS("au_fname")

+ " " + EvalS("au_lname"); }

),

"City",

"State"

};

}

This changes the output of the control

with a new column called Full Name that

shows the concatenated name of the au-

thor and the city and state fields only.

Dynamic Auto DataThis is the control that does everything

the above controls do on a single page.

This gets created automatically on the

page when you create a new table based

page and when you view it you will get all

the functionality for table manipulation

you need on the page without writing

even a single line of code. This is a very

powerful and useful control that lets you

become much more productive in a mat-

ter of seconds rather than the hours that

used to be taken earlier to do something

like this.

All in all, the Dynamic data controls

are a huge leap forward in making mun-

dane database manipulation Web pages

easier and quicker to create. This is a

welcome step in the right direction and

will be a great addition to the ASP.NET

stack. �

A custom data page using different dynamic data

controls

Dynamic Data Controls in ASP.NET 'Futures'_final.qxp 10/20/2007 9:03 PM Page 85

Developer


Efficient Unit-testing in JavaWith AgitarOne developers can now do unit testing of their Java code modules very quickly, and eliminate allerrors effectively

Rahul Sah

Unit testing is a practice that de-

velopers use to test their code

modules in isolation to make

sure that each module does what it’s sup-

posed to. JUnit is an Open Source frame-

work which helps in unit testing,

specifically coded on the Java platform.

Developers just have to determine the

test cases and create JUnit tests for their

code modules.

In a typical setup, developers don’t

prefer this added burden of unit-testing

on their shoulders, as they feel that this

should be done by the testing division.

They often overlook the benefits of doing

unit-testing at developmental stage, be-

cause it requires too much work. This

used to make it extremely difficult to

convince developers to do unit-testing at

their end.

Now, there’s a tool that has been in-

troduced by Agitar, called Agitar One,

which creates JUnit tests automatically

for code modules and also prepares the

test cases for them. This significantly re-

duces the time required for unit testing,

enabling an organization to convince its

developers to take up the job.

AgitarOne steps inAs we mentioned,AgitarOne is a unit-

testing software for enterprises who are

engaged in Java-based development. Pro-

ject managers can use it at developmental

stage so that their developers can imple-

ment unit-testing.

It is a server-based model and can ex-

ecute through the code modules to test

how the given code will perform under

normal as well as exceptional conditions.

AgitarOne relieves the developer by gen-

erating several test-cases for code mod-

ules, even for those code patterns which

developers find tedious to create the JU-

nit tests for and normally skip when do-

ing the task, manually.

Once a module is put under test cre-

ation,AgitarOne reads through the code,

creates the test on-the-fly and generates

the report based on the results, observing

which lines of code were executed and

which lines were excluded.Any anomalies

in the code can easily be caught from these

reports.

The test values that AgitarOne uses are

based on random generation of values for

variables and functions.When any test

fails,AgitarOne reports the sequence of

functions and values passed to them so

that a developer may trace through the

code to evaluate the reason why a particu-

lar code couldn’t handle

the value, as per expecta-

tion. Like this, quality

can be ensured for a

code module right from

the development

process.

Installation andsetup

AgitarOne is based

on Eclipse IDE and it

comes packaged with

it.Alternatively, it can

also be installed sepa-

rately as a plug-in to an

existing Eclipse IDE. In

the packaged version, Tomcat server is au-

tomatically configured for AgitarOne and

the client machines can access AgitarOne’s

Dashboard remotely.

Once the server and clients have been

configured, it’s just a few clicks of process

for developers to automate the unit-test-

ing process for their code modules.

The developer has to select his project

or a class-file and through Agitar’s drop-

down menu he can select to create tests,

agitate the code, run the code-rule or gen-

Applies To: Java developers

USP: JUnit generation and code-

rule enforcement

Price: $50,000 per year

Primary Link: www.agitar.com/

products/downloads/

Keywords: AgitarOne

DIRECT HIT!

Agitar’s dashboard gives an overall summary of the project

and detailed reports on each class and its risk-analysis ��

developer agitar one_final.qxp 10/20/2007 7:50 PM Page 92

Developer


erate the Dashboard result of the project.

AgitarOne in actionThe software agitates on a given code

module to check for what that code was

intended to do and what it actually does.

Agitation can be described as a process

of creating multiple instances of classes,

and calling all methods of those classes

with a wide array of input data and ob-

serving the results thus generated.

This input data can be randomly

generated by AgitarOne or can be manu-

ally passed by the developer through fac-

tories (user-defined subclasses). Then

it’s up to the developer to check which

observation forwarded by AgitarOne is

not matching the desired behavior and

the reason for it.

For experiencing this agitation

process, let us take a sample project pro-

vided with AgitarOne.We will try

agitating Product class and see the

observations presented by AgitarOne, so

that we are able to assert on a few of

them to validate code behavior.

In the Product class, we have valida-

tion checks for name and price fields.

Where name can’t be more than 20 char-

acters and price field can have a value

between 0 and 1000.

To start the agitation process on

Product class, select Product.java and

click on Agitate toolbar button or press

Ctrl+F9. Now, in the editor window for

Product.java, we can see in the Code

Coverage style the number of times a

particular line of code has been exe-

cuted. The red indicates that some lines

have not been touched by control flow. In

AgitarOne Server view, status and cover-

age (indicates what percent of the code

lines have been executed) is displayed.

The Observations view indicates

where the problems may be lying with

the code module, in our case the Product

class. Notice the following observation

listing for the Product class.

0 <= this.getName().length() <= 46

As we had defined that a name can’t

be more than 20 characters long, in this

observation we can see that AgitarOne

was able to pass more than 20 characters

long values to the field ‘name’. This

means a validation for that is not being

executed or is being ignored by the pro-

gram control during execution.

Now the developer can directly pre-

sume that the validateName() method of

the code is not being called when set-

Name() method passes the value for

name field. By changing the setName

method to look as following code snip-

pet we can eliminate the error.

public void setName(String name)

throws IllegalArgumentException {

validateName(name);

this.name = name;

}

When we again agitate the Product

class, under the Observations view, we

see a modified observation listed. The

observation for getName() has also been

modified.

Similarly, the developer can make as-

sessment for other observations. He can

assert an observation to hold true for a

situation and can again run

agitation to check the code behavior.

This way a developer, who is well

familiar with his code, can at develop-

mental stage only eliminate possible

redundant errors, by using AgitarOne.

The functionality of Dashboard is an

added advantage, both for a developer

and the project leader.As in Dashboard,

the whole coverage percentage of the

projects’ classes, their progress and the

highest risk classes can be viewed.

ConclusionWith the automation of unit-testing, a

developer with the help of AgitarOne can

implement quality code creation, right

from developmental stage onwards.

Hence, enterprises will benefit with

reduced time of testing and developers

will be able to debug their code and

improve productivity, significantly.

Upon agitation the coverage style is represented along the editor code lines and

Observations view shows the various observations from the agitation result �

Developer Agitar One_final.qxp 10/20/2007 7:40 PM Page 93

Developer


Block Offensive Language from your SiteUsing simple PHP code, you can now locate offensive comments posted by anonymous people on your websiteor blog, and remove or rename them

Rakesh Sharma

Lots of websites nowadays have in-

corporated interactive features,

such as blogs, comments, views,

etc. These allow visitors to post their

comments online.While it’s good to have

such features, they can also become a lia-

bility when users start posting offensive

or derogatory comments on the website.

That ultimately affects the website’s repu-

tation.

If you are also struggling to save your

website’s reputation, then here’s a simple

way out.

In this article, we provide you a PHP

code snippet that will help you stop

banned words from being posted on your

website or blog, by anonymous visitors.

First of all, list down all words in a

text file that you want to ban. Then, write

down a function ’check_offensive_

word()’, which will be responsible for

checking each word written on your web-

site for being an offensive word.The code

for the same is as follows:

<?php

function language_filter($string) {

$offensive =

@file("path/to/your/file/bad_lang.dat"

);

foreach ($offensive as $curse_word) {

if

(stristr(trim($string),$curse_word)) {

$length = strlen($curse_word);

for ($i = 1; $i <= $length; $i++)

{

$stars .= "*";

}

$string =

ereg_replace($curse_word,$stars,trim($

string));

$stars = "";

}

}

return $string;

}

?>

When the string is passed to this

function, the string is parsed and

checked for any offensive word that you

have specified in the file ‘bad_lang.dat’. It

takes a word at a time from the string and

checks if the word is present in the

‘bad_lang.dat’. If the word is present in

the list of offensive words then it simply

calculates the length of the word and

replaces it with a sequence of ‘*’s.

The ‘ereg_replace’ is an in-built func-

tion in PHP which replaces offensive

words with the character you define,

which in this case is ‘*’.

For testing this, write the following

code snippet:

<?php

$string = "test for offensive words.";

print language_filter($string);

?>

If you have defined the word ‘offen-

sive’ in your banned words list, then the

output of the above code will be:

Test for ********* words.

This little code will make your web-

pages a little cleaner.

Applies To: PHP developers

USP: Prevent offensive language

from appearing on your site

Primary Link: www.php.net

Keywords: Language filter

DIRECT HIT!

�

The PHP script that you’ll create will check all content on your web page against a

banned list you’ve created. Any matches it finds are automatically replaced with a ‘*’

Block offensive blogging_final.qxp 10/20/2007 8:57 PM Page 94

Developer


Query Style Programming with OrcasDevelopers can now apply standard query operators in their programs using LINQ with Visual Studio 2008(Orcas) to directly access the data objects

Rahul Sah

Microsoft released Visual Stu-

dio 2008 (project Orcas) Beta

2 in July this year, which in-

corporates .NET Framework 3.5. This

new framework adds support for new

Web protocols to build WCF (Windows

Communication Foundation) services

and also provides support for WPF

(Windows Presentation Foundation).

The other noticeable feature is LINQ,

which we will talk about in detail.

LINQ and its featuresLanguage Integrated Query, LINQ, al-

lows standard query operations to be

integrated onto the .NET platform so as

to provide a unified way to query across

objects, database, and XML in a stan-

dard way. LINQ offers compile-time

syntax checking, rich metadata, and Vi-

sual Studio’s IntelliSense, which were

earlier available with only .NET code.

As LINQ is now part of .NET Frame-

work, it allows for standard query oper-

ators to traverse, filter, and update

using any .NET language programming.

The standard query operators allow

queries to be applied to IEnumerable

based information source and allow de-

velopers to use query style syntaxes

(LINQ expressions) for their codes re-

ferring to objects or datasets. The stan-

dard query operators are used for LINQ

to Objects as well, where they can be ap-

plied to all in-memory information.

The power of LINQ is in its extensibil-

ity. LINQ can provide implementations

that work over SQL data sources. LINQ

to SQL translates LINQ-based queries

into SQL database queries. A database-

specific provider then analyses and

transforms these into appropriate

query language for the data store, for

example, Microsoft SQL Server. Let’s see

how LINQ can be used over Objects in

projects and also over SQL for a data-

base reference.

LINQ to ObjectsLINQ to Objects refers to LINQ expres-

sions used for in-memory objects such

as arrays or datasets. To see Language

Integrated Query at work, let’s create a

new project in Visual Studio 2008. Go to

File>New Project and under Project

Type select Visual Basic’s Windows

project of type Windows Form Applica-

tion and name it as LinqDemo1, with

this Form1.vb gets created. In the fol-

lowing example we will try populating a

DataGridView with information on files

in a directory: ‘E:/docs’ in our case. First

drop a DataGridView from Toolbox

pane onto the Form1 and dock it onto

the parent container. Double clicking on

the Form1 will show the code window,

where on Form Load event we will

Applies To: .NET developers

USP: Programming in query

style

Primary Link: msdn2.microsoft

.com/hi-in/vstudio/aa700831.aspx

Keywords: Orcas, LINQ, LINQ to

SQL

DIRECT HIT!

The LinqDemo example lists the file information in directory ‘E:/docs’ upon execution

of application ��

LINQ.qxp 10/20/2007 6:53 PM Page 76

Developer


first try retrieving the file information

of the directory E:/docs. Using LINQ,

we will now write code in query format

to retrieve the file information. The fol-

lowing code snippet does the same; the

file info will be retrieved for the direc-

tory and stored in ‘files’ variable.

Dim files = From file In

My.Computer.FileSystem.GetFiles("E:\

docs") Order By file Select file

The variable ‘files’ would contain

IEnumerable of String objects. The

compiler automatically gets to know

the type of result the query would re-

turn. And the variable is automatically

type-casted according to returned re-

sult, thus variable would be having all

the file names from the directory. Once

we have the file names, we would now

display file information on DataGrid-

View as a list. For this we will again use

FileSystem to get the file information.

With GetFileInfo of FileSystem we get

all the attributes related to a file, like

name, creation time, size etc. If we were

not to use LINQ here, it would have re-

quired getting a Collection of FileInfo

objects and then using loop we would

have retrieved values to store into an

array. With query-based coding, a de-

veloper can use LINQ to traverse and

retrieve objects. The following code

snippet will return an IEnumerable of

FileInfo objects and then we can popu-

late the DataGridView by passing the

filesInfo to list the result.

Dim filesInfo = From file In files Se-

lect My.Computer.FileSystem.GetFile-

Info(file)

Me.DataGridView1.DataSource =

filesInfo.ToList()

Now, on running the project we can

have the list of files along with the in-

formation listed in the DataGridView.

With this we show how LINQ over ob-

jects in memory is used and how cod-

ing has become easier for the

developers with the standard query op-

erators traversing and retrieving over

list of objects

LINQ to SQLWe have seen how standard query op-

erators can be used to access in-mem-

ory objects for a .NET project using

LINQ. Now LINQ to SQL is also a com-

ponent of Visual Studio 2008. It pro-

vides a platform for managing

relational data as objects coupled with

the ability to use query. In LINQ to

SQL, the data model of a relational

database is mapped to a developer-de-

fined object model. When this is exe-

cuted, LINQ to SQL translates the

language-integrated queries into SQL

for execution by the database, and then

returns the results to the defined ob-

jects. This provides an ability to work

on and manipulate the objects while

LINQ to SQL working in the back-

ground tracks the changes and reflects

them onto the database.

Let’s create a new VB project in Vi-

sual Studio 2008 to see how LINQ to SQL

works. For this create a new Windows

Form Application project and name it as

‘Linq2SqlDemo.’ For LINQ to SQL we

have objects mapped to database enti-

ties. These objects can be simple busi-

ness classes having attributes that

correspond to columns in the database.

But with Visual Studio 2008, we can use

O-R Designer to create these objects that

map to the database. To do this first we

need to add LINQ to SQL classes tem-

plate to the project, which is done by

right-clicking the project name on the

Solution Explorer window and selecting

the Add > New Item option. On the Add

New Item window name it as

PcqDemo.dbml. On clicking ‘OK’ the ob-

ject relation designer opens up. Through

the Server Explorer window, select an

SQL Server database. For this we have a

Select the ‘User’ object, mapped to the table User, in database to set it as the data-

source for the project ��

LINQ.qxp 10/20/2007 6:53 PM Page 77


Developer

demo database added to the Data Con-

nections. For displaying the list of users

from the table ‘Users,’ drag-drop the table

from the data connection onto the O-R

Designer. This creates ‘Users’ object corre-

sponding to the table ‘Users’ with each

property mapping to the corresponding

attribute in the database. This creates a

LINQ to SQL class that connects to the

database; from Properties we can see it

named as PcqDemoDataContext. Now we

can use this class on our application to

access and manipulate the data in the

database.

Coming back to the form design

view we now have to add a data-source

to the project. Here select an Object in-

stead of a Database, something contrary

to what we used to do earlier. On the ob-

ject-binding window select the ‘User’

object under the Project tree. This re-

sults in User object being created as data

source with all the attributes. Dropping

the User object on the form results in

creating Binding Navigator; now dock

the User Binding Navigator to parent

container. On the Form load event write

the code that will fetch the list from the

Users table and display it on the Binding

Navigator. For this get access to Data

Context, which in our case is PcqDemo-

DataContext, and we can declare that

globally as follows:

Private Db_con As New PcqDemo3Data-

Context

Now let’s write a query to list the users

from the database.We will use LINQ

query on user object that is mapped to the

database with the following code snippet:

Dim showUsers = From user In

Db_con.users Order By user.username Se-

lect user

Me.UserBindingSource.DataSource =

showUsers

We need not make database connec-

tions, but a reference to the DataContext

that will do the mapping of the objects to

the database. The query written in LINQ

at compile time gets translated to SQL

query so that the database can execute it

and return the result of the query in an

object-defined form. The LINQ feature is

easy to start up with, and the LINQ to SQL

feature enables the developer to do com-

mon database-related tasks with ease and

reduces their work on coding.

O-R Designer creates the User object and names the DataContext for Database as

PcqDemoDataContext, as shown in Properties window

Dragging DataSource User onto Form creates its BindingSource and its Navigator,

the result shows the User list ordered by attribute username �

On Execution

LINQ.qxp 10/20/2007 6:53 PM Page 78

Contest


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speeding up the development process, and making a site more

accessible as well as dependable. Instead of wasting more

time on theory and concepts, the emphasis is given more on

the practical problems that are very well explained using real

life scenarios. There are step-by-step tutorials and appropri-

ate screenshots for guiding even a novice Web developer. This

book gives an idea starting from the basics such as installing

Visual Web Developer to design tips for building dependable

and accessible sites. After reading this book one can learn how

to display and edit data, the number of ways to publish a fin-

ished site or building a shopping cart. It comes bundled with a

CD containing all the tools and examples you need with Mi-

crosoft Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition and the

MSDN 2005 Express Edition library. If you are a novice devel-

oper or migrating from ASP or PHP technologies for website

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Which of these are used in ASP scripts as delimiters?❐ <%>...</%> ❐ <%...%>❐<script>...</script> ❐ <&>...</&>

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❐ PS ❐ DS

Here’s your chance to win one of these books.Answer the questions below and send them to [email protected] with the subject ‘Books Contest November 2007’. Do include your full name, designation,company name,mailing address and telephone number.Results will be announced on forums.pcquest.comunder the current issue thread. The last date for sending your answers is 30th November 2007.

Books Contest November 2007

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applications by optimally harnessing the potential of

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ner, and provides a solid understanding of the

language's concepts and structure. It provides solutions

to real problems that a developer is likely to face while

trying to deploy their application in a diverse environment

such as the Internet and all the different browsers used to nav-

igate it.

Basically all that is required for having a good hand on the

practical implementation of JavaScript, it covers all. Topics

that it covers include concepts such as ECMAScript basics,

OOPS techniques, the DOM, regular expressions and events,

form validation, browser detection, image roll-overs, sorting

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book contest_nov'07.qxp 10/20/2007 5:51 PM Page 78

The Ultimate Boot CDCreate a Windows based Live CD using this free utility, which lets you add an ample number of recovery andrescue tools for safeguarding and maintaining your Windows based machines

Hands on

You must have heard of Linux

Live CDs. We use them for dif-

ferent purposes, such as rescue,

recovery, antivirus scanning etc, in

Linux environment. Let’s now try to

build a Live CD for Windows with similar

tools that may help you in recovering

your Windows machine from viruses/

hacker attacks, system failures or miss-

configurations. That is quite possible and

all you need is a piece of free software

called Ultimate Boot CD and a genuine

copy of Windows Installer CD.

This tool has more than 50 freeware

utilities (plug-ins), like antivirus, file re-

covery, networking tools, CD burning

software, MBR backup and many others.

You can download UBCD for free and then

install it by running its simple setup

process. Once that is done, you are ready

to write your own boot CD, that is nothing

short of being the ultimate.


Vijay Chauhan

The entire updated AVG antivirus is downloaded for its inclu-

sion in our boot CD. Once the download is complete, you just

have to enable the service by clicking Enable.

Now, by using Build, you can build the ISO image of the boot CD.

This is how it reports, when you press the Build button. Once that

is done, you are ready to burn the CD.

Say, we want to put AVG Antivirus as a plug-in. For that, it will

give us two options. Either we can take our installed antivirus to

the CD or can directly take the latest version from the Internet.

Define the Source of Windows recovery files and name of

the Output folder. Plugins are used to enable or disable any

in-built utility.

2

4

1

3

DIRECT HIT!Applies To: Desktop usersPrice: FreeUSP: Survive virus attacks,do easy repair and recoveryof files and utilitiesPrimary Link:http://www.ubcd4win.com/Google Keyword: Media con-vertor

�

hands on The Ultimate Boot CD_final.qxp 10/24/2007 2:19 AM Page 90

Masking with Corel Photo-Paint Masking is a vital task when compositing an image. Designers usually spend a lot of time selecting an objectand pasting it on another image.We tell you how to do this using Corel Photo-Paint

Hands on

Corel Photo-Paint is a high-qual-

ity image enhancer and image

manipulation program. It is a

companion application of CorelDraw

X3 graphics suite, designed specifically

for image editing. It includes new Image

Adjustment Lab that enables you to

evaluate different color tonal correction

settings for enhancing your photos.

In Photo-Paint there are four mask

modes available for selection. ‘Normal’

mode selects an area in an image, ‘Addi-

tive’ expands the editable regions by

selecting multiple areas, ‘Subtractive’

removes areas from a selection, and

‘XOR’ selects multiple areas.

Here we used Magic wand mask tool

as the background color is uniform.

When you click anywhere on the image

the tool takes the value of the first pixel

and expands the selected area to include

all surrounding pixels of similar value.


Jose PM

For removing the unmasked area go to Edit >Cut and now

you can see the selected background. With this we get the

complete picture

For fine tuning, like removing the blur as highlighted, go to Ob-

ject >Defringe and set value of Defringe in the range of 1--5.

Your mask is now ready for use

Click on background and a red overlay appears on the object

and some parts of the background. For deselecting unneces-

sary overlay on the background just click on the areas

Open a new file and choose a desired background. Paste the

image you want to mask and select Magic Wand Tool. Set tol-

erance value as 5 and select anti-alias and Additive mode

2

4

1

3

DIRECT HIT!Applies To: DesignersPrice: $379USP: Corel Photo-Paint letsyou select objects in just a fewstepsPrimary Link: www. Corel.comGoogle Keyword: MaskingPhoto-Paint

�

Hands on Corel Photopaint.qxp 10/23/2007 2:21 PM Page 90

OptimizeYour Virtual MachinesUse Parallels Compression Server to improve the performance of your virtual machines by cleaning theirhard disks of unwanted clutter

Hands on

Virtual machines have become ubiquitous and are being

used for various purposes ranging from running mission

critical applications to testing. With time and usage, the

size of virtual machine starts increasing and then comes the prob-

lem of increasing the size of its hard disk. This problem can be

solved by using Parallels Compressor Server—a disk

management tool, which can reduce the size of virtual disks and

clean unnecessary files present on the virtual disk. It can be used

on virtual machines created in VMware Workstation, VMware

GSX server, Microsoft Virtual Server and PC, and ‘Parallels Work-

station ' environment.

This tool can either be installed on the host operating

system or inside the virtual machine. If you are running multiple

virtual servers on a single machine, it is recommended that you

install it on the host operating system. This is because then this

tool can be used by all virtual machines running on the host OS.

One can install it on Windows 2003, 2000, XP, 2003 x64, XP

x64, and major flavors of Linux. However, if you are

installing it on the guest OS then it only supports Windows.

How to use?Installing this management tool is simple. Once you’re through

with its installation then you will find a ParallelsCompressor.iso

image file on the location where you’ve installed the software.

Now, go to the settings of the virtual machine that you want to

compress, and in its CD/DVD option specify this image file. To do

this in VMware workstation, go to ‘Virtual Machine Settings’ op-

tion and select CD-ROM. Now choose the ‘ISO image’ option and

click on ‘Browse’ button to specify the location of the ISO image.

This image will be visible in virtual machine’s CD/DVD-ROM

drive. Double click to open the image, click on ‘Manual mode’ but-

ton and this will start the ‘Parallels Compressor Wizard.’ It will au-

tomatically detect the type of VM and OS running on your virtual

machine, and will then ask you to select the mode of compres-

sion. Select the ‘Advanced compression' option. Next, the wizard

will detect and list virtual hard disks present in the virtual ma-

chine i.e. the virtual hard disks created during the creation of

VM and not the real ones. Select the hard disk that you want

to compress, click on ‘Next’ and then choose the compression

level. Parallels Compressor supports three compression

levels: low, high, and medium, and in each level certain VM

optimization tasks are performed. You can simply select the com-

pression level by moving the slider. You can also select the tasks

which you want to be executed during compression. Select the

compression level and click on ‘Compress’. After the first step, the

virtual machine restarts and compression resumes. But before

the process is resumed, a pop up message will ask if you want to

continue. Click on ‘Yes to continue,’ and you’re done.

Swapnil Arora

Parallel compressor lets you decide which tasks should be execu-

ted at the time of compression & choose the level of compression

DIRECT HIT!Applies To: IT managers

Price: $179

USP: Compress virtual disks of VM

Primary Link: http://www.parallels.com

Google Keywords: Virtual machine compression

�


hands on parallels compressor workstation.qxp 10/22/2007 9:35 PM Page 1

2 A CYBERMEDIA PublicationPCQUEST J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 7

hands on parallels compressor workstation.qxp 10/22/2007 9:35 PM Page 2

Spam Busting in Windows Vista Is sorting spam mails from legitimate ones consuming your valuable time? Windows mail in Vista blocksspam and moves it to a junk folder, and even lets you create your own black and white lists. Here’s how

Hands on

Spam has become a major concern

and many a times, there’s more of

spam than legitimate mail com-

ing into a user’s mailbox. Sorting and

deleting all this spam from the inbox

takes a toll on productive time. To evade

spam, there are plenty of paid and free

anti-spam software available.

But if you are using Vista on your

desktop or laptop then you don’t have to

go for third party software. It offers you

a mail client that is designed to protect

users from bulk spam mail. Here we

will show you how to configure Win-

dows Mail in Vista to block incoming

spam. Vista Windows mail also comes

with an option that detects phishing

mails and protects users from getting

‘phished.’ You can even define your

own list of banned email IDs, in case

Vista is not able to detect spam coming

in from them.


Sanjay Majumder

Sometimes, legitimate mails get blocked and sent to junk

folder.To avoid this right-click on the legitimate mail and se-

lect junk E-Mail>add Sender to Safe Senders’ list

To set a block list of your own from Junk mail option go to Block

Senders tab and add all the email IDs that you want to block on

your Windows mail

To block phishing attacks, configure Windows Mail by clicking

Tools> Junk e-mail options. Select ‘phishing’ and tick ‘Protect

My Inbox from messages with potential Phishing Links’

Open Windows Mail, configure your account, click on ‘Tools’

and junk email options. Select the level of protection: No Au-

tomatic Filtering, Low, High, and Safe List Only

2

4

1

3

DIRECT HIT!Applies To: Vista users

USP: Configure Windows Mail

in Vista to combat spam and

phishing attacks

Primary link: http://support.

microsoft.com/ph/11732

Google Keyword: Spam preven-

tion in Vista

�

hands on-blocking unwanted spam with vista_final.qxp 10/23/2007 1:46 PM Page 90

Add More Fire to Your FireFoxFirekeeper scans all incoming traffic to your Firefox browser and uses rules to detect browse- based attacks,hence, providing an additional layer of security

Hands on

Firekeeper is an add-on IDS/IPS for Mozilla Firefox browser,

which detects, warns and blocks malicious websites. It scans

all incoming traffic including URLs, headers, and body of a

webpage to detect browser-based attacks. For compressed,

encrypted or secure traffic (i.e. HTTPS), it scans after decompress-

ing or decrypting it. Firekeeper scans HTTP traffic and tries to look

for patterns of browser based attacks against a set of rules. The

rules for malwares and exploits are set by default, and you can also

easily create custom rules for detecting threats as well. They are

based on the well-known IDS, Snort. Whenever a threat is

detected, Firekeeper displays its full description like its URL, and

online references related to it as an alert. Further, it also asks the

user where to keep this URL, and what action to take on it.

Installing this add-on is simple. Just download the

firekeeper.xpi from the URL mentioned in the Direct Hit box, and

Firefox will automatically install it. After installation restart the

browser, and you can see the icon for Firekeeper on the extreme

right corner of the status bar. Now, as you surf the Web and a web-

site attacks your machine, this add-on will immediately display an

alert and prompt you to take action. You can take any of the four

actions: blacklist, white list, block once and allow once.

Firekeeper rules are made of two parts: Rule header and Rule

options. The header defines three actions that can be taken when-

ever a rule match is detected: pass, drop, and alert. Whenever a

‘pass’ action rule match occurs, it allows processing of HTTP traf-

fic without going for any further checks. Likewise, ‘drop’ action

blocks all traffic without any user intervention, and ‘alert’ gener-

ates an Alert window.

The Rule options describe what should trigger an action and

other information about the rule. There are three choices: url_con-

tent, headers_content, and body_content. Creating a rule is sim-

ple. open a text file and write

alert(msg: attack detected body_content:"clsid|3A"; nocase;)

In the body_content tag specify the content that you want to

scan in the incoming traffic, and in the msg tag define the message

that should be displayed when such content is detected. nocase tag

signifies that the content specified in the body_content tag will be

searched without any arguments.


Swapnil Arora

DIRECT HIT!

Applies To: Firefox users

Price: Free

USP: Harden Firefox against browser basedattacks

Primary Link: http://firekeeper.mozdev.org/

Google Keywords: Firekeeper, browser-basedIDS/IPS

Whenever the traffic matches a rule, a pop-up window is

displayed and user is asked to choose an action to take

After a threat is detected, you can view the Triggered rule and

response HTTP headers of the URL in hex or text modes �

Hands on - Firekeeper_final.qxp 10/23/2007 1:30 PM Page 2

HTTP Fingerprinting SimplifiedWith latest version of httprint tool, you can collect as well as analyze signatures of Web servers, detect changesin Web servers, and also perform Web server inventory

Hands on

httprint is a Web server fingerprint-

ing tool that identifies the type of

the running HTTP server, and also

detects whether a Web server is obfuscated

using a third party software or not. It uses

the HTTP fingerprinting technique that is

quite popular amongst pen testers. One can

use it for Web server inventory and detect-

ing Web enabled devices.

This tool supports automatic SSL

detection and analysis. You can gather

various details about SSL certificates

such as who is the issuer, issue date,

certificate’s expiry date etc. Its signa-

tures database is in a text file, and these

signatures are used to analyze the sig-

natures that the scanned Web server

generates. You can also customize its

signature database. It lets you import

Web server’s details from an nmap scan

and can be installed on all versions of

Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.


Swapnil Arora

After selecting the detected Web server, you can see the http

signature returned from the server and also the OS on which

the Web server is running

httprint also generates a detailed report of the scan performed.

In the screenshot above, you can see a detailed SSL analysis

done by httprint tool

Once the scanning is done, you can view the banner reported

by the Web server and banner deduced by the http print. A

difference between the two implies obfuscation

2

4

1

3

DIRECT HIT!Applies To: Pen testers, IT

managers

Price: Free

USP: Identification of Web

servers

Primary Link: http://www.net-

square.com/httprint/index.shtml

Google Keyword: Web server

fingerprinting

�

Below ‘Host’ option provide the name & port no of the Web

server.To add more hosts, right click and choose ‘Add new’

option. Click on Start to begin the scanning process

hands on httprint.qxp 10/22/2007 9:39 PM Page 90

Linux Online Aware TaskbarA one-click solution for all your online and desktop applications, replacing the current side panel fromGNOME desktops

Hands on

With Linux for desktops gaining momentum

amongst the masses, the need of going online is

increasing. BigBoard, a built-in feature in the up-

coming Fedora 8, is meant for online and desktop apps and

further gets integrated with Google and Mugshot. It is an on-

line panel which at present can only be incorporated with

Linux GNOME desktops. It is considered as a replacement of

the current working panels as it provides access to the in-

stalled application in categorized form, shows online friends

and photos, and the daily schedule. Here we show how to in-

stall and configure it for your needs.

Installation Copy the following installation files from ‘PCQ Professional

CD’ onto your PC:

1. bigboard-0.5.5-1.fc7.i386.rpm

2. hippo-canvas-0.2.24-1.fc7.i386.rpm

3. hippo-canvas-python-0.2.24-1.fc7.i386.rpm

4. mugshot-1.1.55-1.fc7.i386.rpm

Before installing BigBoard on Fedora 7 you need to install

some dependencies for BigBoard. But if you already have these

dependencies installed, the first three commands need not be

run. Execute the following commands to install:

#rpm -ivh hippo-canvas-python-0.2.24-1.fc7.i386.rpm

#rpm -ivh hippo-canvas-0.2.24-1.fc7.i386.rpm

#rpm -ivh mugshot-1.1.55-1.fc7.i386.rpm

#rpm -ivh bigboard-0.5.5-1.fc7.i386.rpm

Starting UpAfter installation, open ‘Run Application’ window by pressing

‘Alt+F2’ and start BigBoard by initiating the command ‘big-

board.’ A slidebar appears. There are two login options: first is

to login using GNOME online account. Using this you can pro-

vide your public information such as name, choose picture,

and upload photo. This is also required for integrating e-mail

account and IM with Bigboard’s panel. The only catch is that

only the users using these apps through BigBoard can see and

interact with each other. So a user using GTalk through Big-

Board can only see other users who are also using GTalk

through BigBoard. The second login is using Gmail account,

which is required if you have integrated Gmail to the online

panel ‘BigBoard.’ After login, it shows the online apps and the

files shared online. It also lists apps and documents you often

use and provides a search option which helps you find multi-

ple elements within your desktop and Internet.

Rakesh Sharma

Bigboard’s panel depicting the recently used apps and the

schedule getting updated with the online integrated apps

DIRECT HIT!Applies To: Gnome users

Price: Free

USP: Online desktop sidebar for Fedora 8

Primary Link: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureOnlineDesktop

Google Keywords: BigBoard Linux

�


hands on big board -- linux online aware taskbar.qxp 10/23/2007 3:16 PM Page 1

Add Liveliness to Your Web Pages Lively animated images add on to the visual appeal of Web content.You can use Photoshop for creating suchimages in a few easy steps

Hands on

If you think Photoshop is only meant

for retouching photographs, color

correction or image manipulation,

then think again. One can even create

small animations for the Web by using

Photoshop CS3 to make Web pages look

more colorful and accessible. Using CS3,

one can create frame based animations

by modifying image layers to show

movement. Normally, Web designers use

specialized software programs for creat-

ing an animated page and spend a lot of

time to figure out how their graphic

would look on website. Using CS3, de-

signers can also preview how their file

will look on Web, how large its size is and

how much time will it take to download.

This will help them take quick decisions

as to how they want their artwork to ap-

pear on the Web. Here, in this article

we’ll show you how to create an anima-

tion for a submarine going under sea.


Jose PM

Now, select the path that you defined in the previous step,

and click on ‘Make selection’ option. In the window that pops

up, define Feather radius as 0.5 pixels, and cut submarine

Save this image in a separate file, and the area from where the

image is cut will be either white or transparent. Fill that area

with sky and ocean

Use the ‘Pen’ tool to make a path for the submarine image.To

save this path, select the ‘Path’ option from the Windows menu,

double click on the ‘Work Path’ option and define it

Open image of a submarine in Photoshop, press Ctrl+A to

select the image, and paste it onto a new layer. Keep the

background layer visibility off

2

4

1

3

DIRECT HIT!Applies To: Web designers

USP: No more toggling b/w

different animation programs.

You can upload your animations

directly on Web

Primary Link: www.adobe.com

Google Keyword: Pulsating

animation

��

hands on imple animation.qxp 10/22/2007 9:45 PM Page 90


Hands on

Select layer one, chose path 1 from the Path window, make a

selection and paste submarine inside the selection using the

‘Paste into’ option present under the Edit menu

You can use the ‘Brush’ or ‘Healing Brush’ tool to fill that area

with sky and ocean. Select and copy the new background,

and paste it onto multiple layers

Go to layer 2, use ‘Paste into’ option and move the submarine

image a bit using the arrow key, and merge the new layer with

layer 2. Repeat this step for all layers

Under the Windows menu, select the ‘Animation’ option and

add new frames. Select layer 1 as first frame, layer 2 as

second frame and so on

Define interval time as 0.1 second and save your animation in Photoshop CS3 by using the ‘Save for Web and devices’ option

present under the File menu. It’ll optimize the animation file and save it as a GIF file.To see animation created, click on the ‘Play’

button present under the ‘Animation’ window

6

7 8

9 10

�

5

hands on imple animation.qxp 10/22/2007 9:46 PM Page 91

Using Explorer as ShellEnhance the functionality of your Windows Explorer by adding custom commands through a small and simple tool called ‘StExBar’

Hands on

Imagine how simple your work would become if MS DOS

prompt is incorporated into Windows Explorer. Also, how

fast and easy things would turn if Windows Explorer is

customized according to one’s need. StExBar is a tool that ful-

fills all the requirements by incorporating MS-DOS features

into Windows Explorer.

Here we show how StExBar can be installed to put addi-

tional functionality to Windows Explorer by adding custom

commands. Installing this tool is pretty simple:

just download the ‘dll’ file that is approximately 157 KB from

the link provided in the specs box. It is free and hence

you need not have any serial code or license to get it

working. Go to start>run and type the following

command ‘regsvr32.exe c:\StExBar.dll’ and click on OK

button. The ‘regsvr32.exe’ is a process within Windows

that is used to register the ‘dll’ and ActiveX control to the

registry.

After the installation, open Windows Explorer, right click

on the toolbar and select ‘StExBar.’ This tool requires Windows

XP or a higher to get work. It is also provided with an option of

adding custom commands to ease your work.

Adding custom commandsClick on ‘Option’ button available on the ‘StExBar’ bar. A Win-

dow pops up, now click on the ‘Edit Config File’ button that

opens up a configuration file in notepad. If you want to add a

link to notepad, simply add these lines at the end of the config-

uration file:

name = Editor

tooltip = open the selected file in the notepad

commandline = %WINDIR%/system32/notepad.exe %sel-

paths

The lines above should be written in exactly the same man-

ner, as this is the required format for adding custom command

to ‘StExBar.’ Here, the first includes ‘name’ that you want to be

displayed on the bar, second is the ‘tip’, and third is the ‘com-

mand’ i.e. path to your custom program, including the param-

eter you want to pass. After you are done, save the

configuration file, and finally click on the ‘OK’ button. For test-

ing, select any text file and click on the ‘Editor’ button which

we have just created on the ‘StExBar’ bar. The file opens up in

notepad.


Rakesh Sharma

DIRECT HIT!

Applies To: End users

Price: Free

USP: Ease up your daily work

Primary Link: tools.tortoisesvn.net/StExBar

Google Keywords: StExBar

�

With the rename option in StExBar, you can select as many

no. of files and change extensions as you want in one go

StExBar.qxp 10/22/2007 9:47 PM Page 2

D I Y


We first talked about

Microsoft’s Compute Cluster

Suite in April last year. Lots of

things have changed since then in the

world of HPC, and likewise, the Cluster

Suite has also undergone many changes.

At that time, we had just three 64-bit ma-

chines in our labs and we used all of them

to create the MS Compute Cluster. The in-

terface was so difficult that we were not

even able to create a test MPI (Message

passing interface) job and submit to the

cluster properly. But of course that was

the first public beta of MS CCS and it was

a bit too much to expect full blown func-

tionality from it.

Today we have the new Compute

Cluster Suite SP1, and also have twenty

64-bit machines at our disposal. That’s

why this time, we decided to build a much

bigger cluster of 15 nodes, with each

node having a dual core CPU (plus one

head node) using the MSCCS SP1 and

then test it with some standard industry

benchmarks.

We’ll first talk about how to build such

a cluster, and then we’ll discuss how to port

High Performance Linpack(HPL) to Win-

dows and then finally run it on all the

nodes in a distributed manner to see what

kind of performance it’s able to deliver.

Linpack is a benchmark that meas-

ures floating point operations (FLOPS)

and comes in different variants. One such

variant of Linpack is HPL or High Perfor-

mance Linpack. It is an industry standard

benchmark for measuring performance

of supercomputers and has been used by

top500.org for benchmarking world’s

best 500 supercomputers.

The Setup MS CCS doesn’t work on 32-bit architec-

ture, but you can install either the Head

or the Client node on a 32-bit machine.

The 15 nodes that we used for setting up

MSCCS had an Intel Core 2 Duo 1.8 GHz

processor and 512 MB RAM. For the head

node, we took a Dual Xeon processor ma-

chine with one GB RAM. The 15 nodes

were meant to process the computing

jobs, whereas the Head node managed

jobs and the whole cluster.

To interconnect the cluster we’ve

used a Gigabit Ethernet network. All

nodes of course, had Gigabit Ethernet

cards, and were PXE boot enabled. These

PXE enabled cards are used for installing

an OS remotely and come in handy while

using the Windows Remote Deployment

server to do a bulk installation of OSes on

multiple machines. All nodes were head

less and connected to an IP KVM for

centralized management.

Installing the Head NodeThe first thing you need of course is a

copy of MS Windows Server 2003

Compute Cluster Edition, and you can

download a 180 days trial version of the

same from http://tinyurl.com/3ysqz5.

For this download to be successful you

will require a Microsoft .Net Passport.

Install it on the machine you want to

use as the Head node. The same OS can

be used for creating the Head node as well

as the Compute nodes. After

Anindya Roy

��

Running Linpack on Win Compute ClusterAre clusters and number crunching machines a part of your fantasy world? With this series, we’ll takeyou through a journey of how to build and benchmark your own MS Compute cluster using Linpack

While installing Microsoft Compute Cluster Pack, you will see this screen. Select the

first option to use a node as the Head node

SERIES

PART I

CB

diy_ms compute cluster deployment_final.qxp 10/24/2007 5:57 PM Page 110

installing the Head node, create an

isolated domain for the cluster.

If you still have another domain

controller on this network, then you can

create the head node as an additional do-

main controller. We created an isolated

domain controller for our setup. For this

we ran the dcpromo command and fol-

lowed the dcpromo wizard. Just make

sure that while creating the domain you

also install and create a local DNS server

on the Head node. This will help you

when you deploy MS CCS.

Now, install the DHCP server on this

machine so that the remote deployment

server can work properly. (Configuration

of DHCP server is out of the scope of this

article and we are assuming that you

have the basic knowhow of how to con-

figure basic services like DHCP on a Win-

dows Server 2003). One word of caution-

if you are planning to provide an Internet

connection to your cluster (which is a

good idea as you will get regular updates

and downloads easily), then configure it

using Windows Internet Connection

Sharing and not with Remote Access

Server (RAS). I am not sure about the

reason but MSCCS recommends ICS in-

stead of RAS, and we also had troubles

while we tried to run it with RAS.

As you are done with the configura-

tion of all necessary services i.e. ADS,

DNS, DHCP and ICS, download the latest

x64 version of Compute Cluster Pack SP1

from http://tinyurl.com/2rjwt4.

When installation starts the wizard

pops up, which is pretty much self

explanatory. All you have to do is to select

the ‘Create a new compute cluster’

option. Follow this wizard to install all the

required components to make the ma-

chine a Head Node.

Go to Program Files and you will find

a new menu where you will see two appli-

cations: Cluster Job manager (used for

submitting and managing cluster jobs)

and Cluster Administration (used to

configure cluster and cluster nodes).

Configuring the ClusterThis process involves three major tasks:

1. Configuring the network topology

2. Installing and adding nodes

3. User management

Since, ours is a test cluster we won’t

give much emphasis to the users manage-

ment part, rather we will focus on config-

uring the network and nodes now.

Configure the NetworkTo configure the cluster, go to Program

files>Microsoft Compute Cluster Pack>

and start the Compute Cluster Adminis-

trator. Under the ’To do List‘ pane, select

the ‘Configure Compute Cluster Topol-

ogy’ option.

This will open up the wizard. From

the drop down menu select ’Compute

Nodes Isolated on Private Network‘ and

proceed to the next step.

Further the wizard will ask you to se-

lect the network cards which are con-

nected to the public and private network

one by one. Select the right option and

then click on Finish. After this, disable the

firewall, which is recommended consid-

ering the fact that ours is a test setup.

For this, click on the ‘Manage Win-

dows Firewall Settings’ option, which will

open up the standard Firewall manager

D I Y


This is the ‘admin’ window of Compute Cluster Pack. All the installation and manage-

ment tasks happen from this single interface

Wanna be part of this series ?What we plan is to do a comparative shootout of commodity clustering architecture inthe series, where we will benchmark all the clustering solutions one after the other eachmonth on similar set of physical hardware. At the end of the series we will compile afull-fledged summary: which is the best clustering solution and will cover all the as-pects such as usability, support, performance, cost, etc. But that’s a long way to goand right now we can’t be sure where will this story head, because of the requirementof huge amount of resources , time and skilled manpower. So, we are looking out forcontributors who can help us in this story. For more discussion on the topic we’ve al-ready started a post on our forums. You can also join in and discuss at http://forums.pc-quest.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6148.

��


window and disable the firewall. Remem-

ber, if you are building it on a production

network then chose your security policy

options accordingly.

Installing Nodes Click on the ‘Install RIS’ link and install

Remote Deployment Server. Then click on

the ‘Manage Image’ option. This will open

up a wizard. In the next step, select ‘Add a

new Image’ option and click on Finish.

This will start the standard RIS wizard and

will then ask for the folder where it will

create the RIS root directory.

Make sure that for this folder you select

a partition other than the system parti-

tion; else you won’t be able to install Win-

dows 2003. Provide a name to the folder

such as RemoteInstall and then proceed.

Further the wizard will ask you about the

location of the CD, whose Image you have

to create for remote installation. Place the

Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster

edition CD in the CD drive of the Head node

and specify the drive letter in this wizard.

Click on ‘Next’ and proceed till the

wizard gets completed and the image

building process starts. This process

will take around 10 to 15 minutes for

completion.

Once it is done, your RIS is ready and

now you can turn on and boot all your

Compute nodes over the network to start

an un-attended remote installation. This

process is quite simple, so we won’t discuss

its details.

Adding NodesTill now, only the OS has been installed on

the Compute nodes. To make the whole

setup work properly, you have to install a

few more components. For this, go to each

node one by one, uncheck ‘create the

machine a Head node’ option and run the

Compute Cluster Pack on them. This will

install all the required components,

though in some cases it might also require

to download some upgrades etc from

Internet during installation. So make sure

that you have the connection handy

if required.

Once this is done, you can now add

nodes to the Head node. For this first join

all nodes to the Cluster domain and reboot

them. Now go to the Head node and open

Compute Cluster Administrator. From the

‘To do list’ select the Add Node option,

which will open up a wizard. It will ask the

kind of employment that you want,

select ‘Manual Deployment’ and then click

on ‘Next’. In the next step, type in the

FQDN of all the nodes one by one and add

them by using the Add button. Then close

the wizard by clicking on Finish. The

FQDN will be something like Node00x,

where x is the number of the node.

D I Y


This is the place where you configure network topology of your cluster.The next

likely option will be ‘Compute node loaded’

In the ‘Compute Cluster Administrator’ window, you can check the status of the nodes.

To check the exact resource utilization of any node, use the System Monitor option ��

s


Porting Linpack for WindowsCompute ClusterHere, we will see how one can port (re-

compile) Linpack source in Windows and

then run it on Windows Compute Cluster

Environment. We tried it and used it for

benchmarking our created Microsoft

Compute Cluster. But we faced a problem.

Basically, Linpack is an application used

majorly for testing Linux based clusters

and trust me, porting it to run on MSCCS

was not at all a child’s play.

In this article, we will see how with the

help of some tools and libraries, you can

recompile the HPL source files in your

Windows architecture and run it on the

top of MSCCS.

PrerequisitesThe list of prerequisite SDKs and libraries

is too long, but the first thing that you need

is MS Visual Studio 2005. Install it on any

of the nodes of your MS Compute Cluster.

The compiler is to be installed on one of the

nodes because it ensures that you are com-

piling your application on the right hard-

ware architecture and as a result you’ll get

better performance.

After this, download both the AMD

and Intel’s Math Kernel libraries. Down-

load and install the file called ‘acml3.5.0-

64-win64’ from http://tinyurl.com/

2k6tny. Also download and install the In-

tel’s Math Kernel library use the following

link: http://tinyurl.com/2p9m8f.

Now install the MS Compute Cluster

SDK from http://tinyurl.com/3yjyg9. Just

make sure that you download and install

the 64-bit version. Now the installation is

done but for Linpack to work properly

you’ll have to perform some nasty tricks.

This is because the makefile that we are

going to use for compiling Linpack had a

lots of path names hardcoded.

To begin with, first create a folder

called “scratch” at C:\ of the node where

you have installed all the above mentioned

components. Then go to the folders where

you have installed ACML and MKL.

By default they will be in the Program

Files folder if you did not give any other

path. Go to the AMD folder first and

rename the ACML3.5.X file as

ACML3.0.0. Similarly, go to the Intel’s

folder and rename 9.1.x as 8.0.1. So, the

hacking part is done and we are ready to

work on the actual file.

Compiling LinpackNow download the latest version of HPL

from http://tinyurl.com/2mopw8. Unzip

it in a way that the HPL folder comes

under the C:\scratch folder.

In Linux, Linpack uses the make com-

mand for compilation. But the makefiles

are generally created for different Linux

distros and not for the Windows. So, now

you have to grab a makefile for Windows.

To make our task easier, if we also get a

.vcproj file for Linpack then we can use it

to compile Linpack directly on VS 2005.

You can download all the required compo-

nents from our forum. The link for the

same is http://forums.pcquest.com/fo-

rum/viewtopic.php?t=6154&highlight=.

Go to this link and download the

xphl_port.zip file. Unzip it under the

C:\scratch\hpl folder and copy the

HPL_timer_walltime.c to the

C:\scratch\hpl\testing\timer folder. There

will be a file with the same name already

sitting in that folder, so while copying

replace the old one with the new one.

Double click on the xhpl.vcproj file and

open it as a VC++ project in VS 2005. You

have to build the project but before that

one more thing is required. The VS 2005

while compiling an exe embeds the mani-

fest file inside the exe, which is not recog-

nized by our mpiexec command that

finally you have to use for running Lin-

D I Y


��

In MSCCS you can execute a task directly through the command prompt by running the

mpiexec command. To submit a task you’ve to go through the Task Properties window


D I Y


pack. So, you have to tell VS2005 not to

embed the manifest file while compiling.

To do so, go to the Property page of the

xhpl project and click on Manifest Tool>

input output and change the value of

‘Embed Manifest’ from Yes to No. Now

close this window and go to the Build

menu, and click on the Build Project op-

tion to compile Linpack. The exe will be

created in the C:\scratch\hpl\bin\

64\xhpl.exe.

Running XHPLTo run XHPL you have to use the Compute

Cluster Job Manager. For this go to

Program Files> Microsoft Compute Clus-

ter Pack. Then, go to the File> Submit job

Menu. This will open up a window. Here

provide a descriptive job name and go to

the Processors tab. Then select the number

of processors that you want to use from

your cluster to process your job. Remem-

ber, the number you provide should be

equal to the number of cores and not the

number of physical processors.

Now go to the Tasks tab and in the

Command line field, type in the command

you want to run. If it’s an MPI process that

you are going to run (which Linpack is)

then the command will be something like

’mpiexec xhpl.exe’. To add tasks click on

the Add button. Tasks that have been

added will get listed under the task list.

Select the task and click on the Edit button.

Here, provide the working directory, and

input and output file name. The working

directory is essentially the shared location

where the xhpl.exe sits and it should look

something like Error! Hyperlink reference

not valid.

The output file can be any file where

you want to get the output of Linpack. By

default it is hpl.out. The input file is of

course the HPL.dat file. Provide these

values and submit the task to get executed.

This will start the xhpl process on all

the nodes. But if it fails then you have to

modify the hpl.dat file in the bin folder.

This is the file where you set all runtime

settings for xhpl and from here you can

also tune XHPL for performance. Tuning

XHPL is a tedious job and it is not possible

for me to cover it in these two pages.

While writing this article, I am still try-

ing to figure out how to get the best

performance out of our cluster by tuning

XHPL. So far, I have achieved some

46 GFlops, but there is still a long way to

go. So, when I am done with this tuning,

next month I will talk about how to tune

XHPL in detail. Till then you can refer to

the article hosted at

http://tinyurl.com/23q98y.

Applications built using Visual Studio with Manifest option enabled, can’t be run using

MS CCS.Therefore, disable that option before you compile Linpack

Once you have submitted the job, you can then view the status of the job under the Job

Monitor window �



Notebooks are a boon for travellers. They give you the mo-

bility and freedom to carry all your data, applications, etc

wherever you travel. Have you ever wished that you could

carry the same data and applications without really lugging a lap-

top around with you? Maybe instead of a laptop, carry a small de-

vice that fits in your shirt’s pocket? Well, that’s exactly what

RingCube Technologies has introduced. It’s a desktop virtualiza-

tion software called MojoPac. It can be installed on any USB stor-

age device and used to capture personal settings, configurations,

applications and data files from your personal computer. By con-

necting a MojoPac installed device to any Win XP based PC, you

can have your own personal desktop created on that host PC.

MojoPac currently supports Windows XP based computers. It

is a small installable file of about 8 MB that can be installed on any

USB 2.0 compliant device, be it an iPod, mobile phone, pen drive

or portable HDD. Once MojoPac has been installed, you can log on

to the MojoPac desktop that runs from the portable device. It con-

verts your portable device into your ‘C’ drive where applications

can be loaded and data files copied. It also provides the facility to

transfer your Mozilla and IE settings such as bookmarks, Home

page, etc through a Data Copy. This allows you to have your own

personal bookmarks and browsing settings when using MojoPac

on a host PC. The ‘Data Copy’ option can also be used to transfer

files and folders from the host PC to the portable device. So, effec-

tively, the device having MojoPac is the real PC having all applica-

tions and settings while the computer to which it is attached is just

a utility to run MojoPac. You can install applications on the

portable device and access them from any PC, anywhere. Most of

the regular applications can be installed, be they for business, de-

velopers, editing tools or games. MojoPac allows full access to the

host PC’s resources like printers, network, CD/DVD drive and at-

tached peripherals. It provides complete isolation from the host PC,

so that application data and settings are not stored on the host PC,

including browser history. We installed MojoPac Deluxe on a 110

GB portable USB HDD, and installed applications like MS Office,

Eclipse, Java SDK, etc on it, along with importing IE settings. When

plugging this device on an XP machine, without MS Office or Java

installed, we were able to work on Eclipse and create MS Office doc-

uments. We were also able to have our IE bookmarks available.

However, what it lacks is security. In case, you lose the portable de-

vice, you lose all the settings along with it. MojoPac is available in

two versions---Deluxe is paid, while Freedom is available for free

but limited by the lack of technical support and doesn’t have the

option to configure auto-updates which run each time the device

is plugged into any host.

BOTTOMLINE: An ideal tool for professionals to carry theirpersonal settings and applications around, and that too ina device that fits into their pocket. �

MojoPac Desktop Virtualization SoftwareInstall MojoPac on your iPod, mobile phone or portable USB HDD to carry personal applications, settings anddata and transform any Windows XP based computer into your personal computer

Rahul Sah

Reviews

Price: $49.99 (1 license)

Meant For: Mobile executives

Key Specs: Supports Win XP based PCs, USB2.0 storage devices

Pros: Complete access to host resources; isolatesworking environment from host PC

Cons: No security features

Contact: RingCube TechnologiesTel: 9945031390 Email: [email protected]

SMS Buy 131181 to 56767

Shown here is the Mojopac desktop on the host PC.You can

freely use all your personal settings and applications

Review - MojoPac_final.qxp 10/23/2007 1:14 PM Page 116


GENOME 2.20 is out and has already been incorporated in

two most popular Linux distros---Mandriva 2008 and

OpenSuSE 10.3. However, it’s not yet out as standard RPM

or deb files for installation or upgrade on older distros. So, if you

don’t want to install Mandriva or OpenSuSE, you can still check

out the new GNOME. Simply download Foresight Linux from

http://torrent.GNOME.org/, which is essentially a Live CD devel-

oped by GNOME developers. Here’s a sneak preview of the popu-

lar desktop GUI.

Intuitive new featuresIf you are among those who often send mails and forget to attach

actual files, then GNOME has something really interesting for

you. The default mail client of GNOME 2.20, ie Evolution, has

this nifty feature that is always on the lookout for words such as

attachment, attach, etc whenever you type a mail. In case it finds

a match, it warns you about the possibility of a mail attachment

and requests you to confirm the same before you send the mail.

Of course, there is no great technology behind this but it’s really

useful to have. Plus, you will also see a task bar icon of evolution

in GNOME 2.20.

GNOME is clever enough to understand the EXIF information

from new age cameras. EXIF or Exchangeable Image File is an im-

age file format that incorporates specific metadata into JPEG or Tiff

files, which when copied to a computer, tell you the orientation of

an image. So, your GNOME File Manager will automatically dis-

cover portrait and landscape images while being transferred from

the EXIF enabled camera to the PC and do the needful changes to

their orientation.

GENOME has another interesting feature that doesn’t involve

any rocket science, but is thoughtful nonetheless. GNOME’s

‘Locked Screen’ dialog has a button called ‘Leave a note’ where vis-

itors can drop in a note in your absence. You don’t need sticky notes

anymore thanks to this feature.

User profilesA new tool called Sabayon has been incorporated with GNOME,

which is a User Profile Editor where admins can configure user pro-

files sitting on a live GNOME session. When a profile is created or

edited, a nested GNOME session starts up. An administrator can

use this to change GConf keys inside the GNOME session. Inside the

nested window, the admin can create personalized profiles depend-

ing on the type of work a user is supposed to perform. The best part

is that these profiles can be saved in a central location and deployed

across multiple machines.

BOTTOMLINE: The new GUI has a host of interesting fea-tures, some of which are so simple, and yet one wonderswhy didn’t anybody think of them before. �

GNOME 2.20Support for EXIF digital cameras, a new user profiles editor, and a few thoughtful features in the Evolutionmail client are a few of the highlights in the latest desktop environment for linux. Here’s a sneak peak.

Anindya Roy

Preview

Price: N/A

Meant For: Linux Users

Key Specs: New Evolution client; EXIF informationsupport for digital cameras; New User ProfileEditor

Pros: Has incorporated some very thoughtful newfeatures

Cons: None

Contact: http://torrent.GNOME.org/

SMS Buy 131183 to 56767

If you type attach while composing a mail in Evolution,

without actually attaching a file, it pops up a warning

review - gnome 2.20_final.qxp 10/24/2007 9:32 AM Page 120


NetOp Remote Control (RC) is a software to help organ-

izations remotely manage hosts on their network.

The key highlight of this software is that it let’s you

control machines on different platforms, which include Win-

dows, Linux, Mac, and Solaris. The software has two compo-

nents, a Host and Guest. An administrator would use the Guest

component to connect to a Host computer to remotely access

and control it.

By using RC, a Guest can have full control of the remote

machine, including the authority to even Shutdown, Lock, or

restart it. In addition to remote control, RC also provides file-

transfer between Guest and Host, text, audio, and video chat, and

login authentication for testing a Guest.

The Host provides full functionality for Windows plat-

forms, and for Linux, Solaris and Mac, it provides remote con-

trol, chat and file transfer facility only. Similarly, the Guest

module for Windows provides all functionalities, but only re-

mote connection facility is available for the Guest module on

Linux, Solaris or Mac platforms.

The installation and setup of Host and the Guest components

is easy. Once the Host has been installed, it can be configured to

cater to any Guest. Plus, policy settingss can be made about each

user’s access privilege. There’s an IP filtering option that acts as

security against unauthorized Host access. From the Guest com-

ponent, by entering the name or IP address and selecting the

communication profile, one can easily access the Host. The com-

munication profile is the protocol that the Host will be allowing

that Guest for access.

RC provides additional functionality to Windows OS remote

desktops, such as cross-platform support, file-transfer between

host and client with split-screen and drag-drop feature, hard-

ware and software inventory of the host system. It also provides

end-to-end encryption of data packets with 256-bit AES and

Guest authentication for remote control. The feature of Send/Re-

trieve clipboard enables the contents of clipboard to be shared be-

tween the host and client computers.

The software worked well over a LAN. However, when we

tried to use it on a 256 kbps WAN connection, it didn’t work.

Windows Remote Desktop however worked fine on the same

WAN link. So it would be nice if the software allows connectiv-

ity over slow WAN links as well.

BOTTOMLINE: A good buy for enterprises that want tocentralize their maintenance and support tasks. �

NetOp Remote Control 9.0If you have a heterogenous network and are looking for a solution to remotely manage all the hosts on it, thencheck out this solution. It lets you gain complete control over remote hosts over an encrypted link

Rahul Sah

Reviews

Price: $183 (per Host) and $183 (per Guest) Meant For: IT managersKey Specs: File transfer between a host and aguest, guest ID authentication, transfer keyboardand mouse controls to hostPros: Multiple platform support, data packetencryption Cons: No file transfer between Linux guest andWindows hostContact: M3 Idea Solutions–NetOp India,Coimbatore, Tel: 2440402, E-mail: [email protected] Buy 131184 to 56767

By selecting the host from network-list and appropriate com-

munications profile, we can connect with the host machine

reviews_netop remote control fulpage_final.qxp 10/24/2007 9:25 AM Page 122

Reviews

�



Reviews

�




This switch has the ability to handle voice traffic for tele-

com service providers and data centers. It has 24 10/100

ports, and two shared Gigabit Ethernet ports. The X250e

series switches are stackable and so there are two stacking inter-

faces provided at the back.

The switch provides high availability and performance with

its advanced traffic management features like modular operat-

ing system and redundant power supply. ExtremeXOS, the mod-

ular operating system that it comes bundled with, monitors each

independent OS process and in case any of them halts, it auto-

matically restarts the process resulting in continuous network

uptime. It also has support for EAPS (Ethernet Automatic Pro-

tection Switching) that allows the network to recover from

failovers within a fraction of a second. This ensures that VoIP

calls or digital video feeds transmitted do not drop or freeze due

to link fail-over on the network.

The Summit 250e-24P supports Power over Ethernet and

can be used by devices that require power from LAN connections,

such as IP telephones. The switch also supports the

standard Layer 2 and Layer 3 fea-

tures such as

Spanning

Tree Protocol, Link Aggrega-

tion, DHCP and Quality of Service (QoS).

Other two features, MAC filtering and port mirroring, make

it a more secure device to connect your wares with. Especially

MAC filtering, which allows a port to be dedicated to a given MAC

address and locked for any new network device, thus preventing

network attacks from frequently changing MAC addresses.

The switch doesn’t get shipped with a default IP. That has to

be configured through its Command Line Interface (CLI). Once

the IP has been configured, the switch can be managed through

CLI or a Web interface, called ExtremeXOS Screenplay. The lat-

ter interface is quite detailed and provides functionalities to con-

figure VLANs, set policies for ports and monitor them, and view

statistics related to network traffic.

We tested the switch using NetIQ Qcheck in an isolated net-

work. It gave a throughput of 94.118 Mbps for transferring

1000 Kbytes of payload from one end to the other.

And when we flooded the switch with excessive

traffic over some ports and checked its

throughput on other ports, it still

managed a decent 94 Mbps. This

means the switch is intelligent

enough to isolate ports having excessive

traffic, so that throughput over other ports is not

hampered.

Along with Summit X250e-24P we also received another

switch from the X250e series, the Summit X250e-48T. This

switch has mostly similar features but twice the number of

10/100 ports, however, it does not support Power over Ethernet.

The price is also same as that of X250e-24P and the performance

is equally good.

BOTTOMLINE: Its performance and features make it idealfor networks where VoIP or high density data streamingare used. �

Extreme Networks Summit X250e-24PThis Fast Ethernet switch is used to manage high density traffic coming from multiple devices such as IP tele-phones, wireless APs and others that require Power over Ethernet

Rahul Sah

Reviews

Price: Rs 76,000 (1 yr warranty)Meant For:Telecom providers, Data CentersKey Specs: Modular OS, port mirroring, PoE,EAPS, VLAN, MAC address filtering Pros: Good performance, detailed Web basedmanagement interface Cons: NoneContact: Avaya GlobalConnect, GurgaonTel: 9818672278 Email: [email protected]

SMS Buy 131186 to 56767

reviews_Avaya Switches_final.qxp 10/22/2007 1:14 PM Page 106


This time we received a managed and unmanaged HP

ProCurve switch. These are both meant to be used at

the edge of the LAN in an organization.

HP 1700 24GThis is a 22-ports managed Fast Ethernet switch with 2 dual-

personality ports. It supports IEEE 802.3ab Link Aggregation

Control protocol and 802.3x Flow Control protocol to enable

transmission and reception of data in an orderly manner. It

also comes with some QoS features, such as IEEE 802.1p port

prioritization that delivers data to devices by honoring preset

priorities. Its MAC address table supports up to 8000 entries,

which help the switch in supporting a large network. Broad-

cast Control is another QoS feature that cuts down unwanted

broadcast traffic on the network. The switch also features a

fan-less design for silent operation.

It is easy to configure through a Web-

based interface. The VLAN

configuration with this

browser-based interface

was easy and also the fea-

ture of supporting Jumbo

frames can be enabled

through this interface.

Jumbo packet support means

frame size can be up to 9216 bytes to

improve performance for large data transfers. The interface

not only gives configuration and monitoring functionalities

but also has the option for setting security and doing diagnos-

tic tests. Coming to performance, we stressed the switch with

NetIQ Qcheck. It gave a throughput of 94.118 Mbps on an iso-

lated network for transferring 1000 Kbytes of payload from

one end to another and in a response time of 1 ms, which is

pretty similar to the performance of Netgear ProSafe FS728TS

switch (reviewed August ‘06). Further,

when we flooded the switch

with excessive traffic, the

switch still managed an aver-

age throughput of 56 Mbps.

HP 1400 24GThis is a 22-ports unmanaged

Gigabit Ethernet switch, which also has 2

dual personality ports. It supports auto-sensing of link speed

and auto-negotiation of half or full-duplex modes on each

port, so that the network devices work the moment they’re

connected to it. Just like its cousin, it also supports 8000 en-

tries in its MAC address table, supports Jumbo frames, and has

a fan-less design. This switch gave an average throughput of

615.4 Mbps for transferring 1000 Kbytes of payload from one

end to another and in a response time of 1 ms. These results

are lower as compared to D-Link’s DGS-1024D switch that

gave 728 Mbps (reviewed July ‘06). Its throughput dropped to

470 Mbps when we flooded it with excessive traffic.

BOTTOMLINE: Given the prices, these switches are a goodbuy for organizations looking for cost effective productsto put on their LAN-edge. �

HP ProCurve LAN-Edge SwitchesA pair of managed and unmanaged switches that provide a good set of features for deployment on the edge ofa LAN. They’re fit for organizations on a tight budget

Rahul Sah

Reviews

Price: 1400 24G: Rs 16,9501700 24G: Rs. 12,750 (lifetime warranty)

Meant For: LAN-Edge

Key Specs: See Table

Pros: Easy to configure/setup; lifetime warranty

Cons: Drop in throughput when flooded with trafficContact: HP ProCurve Networking, BangaloreTel: 25041424 Email: [email protected]

SMS Buy 131188 to 56767

Key HighlightsHHPP 11770000 2244GG:: Web-based mgmt; 8000 MACaddress table entries; Support for Jumbo frames;Link aggregation; QoS; VLANsHHPP 11440000 2244GG:: 8000 MAC address table entries;support for jumbo frames; auto-negotiation

reviews_HP ProCurve Switches_final.qxp 10/22/2007 10:08 PM Page 124


Reviews

�

Asus have come up with a unique concept of watching

slideshows without having to open a notebook. This

12.1” notebook comes with an external auxiliary display on

the cover of the LCD which lets you view photos, meeting

schedules, phone numbers and play music. Based on Intel’s

latest Santa Rosa platform, it comes with 512 MB RAM and

has a mobile Intel 945 GM Express chipset. It also has a host

of other features such as a 1.3 MP Web

Cam, Bluetooth,

FireWire port,

memory card

reader, etc. It

weighs around 1.7

Kg, which is pretty

comfortable for a fre-

quent trav-

eler.

The key-

pad is well de-

signed and quite comfortable for a 12.1” notebook.

It scored 3419 in PCMark05, which is slightly lesser than

Acer Travel Mate, but still reflects a good high-end application

performance. The lack of a good graphics processor in the

notebook was evident from the score of 225 in 3DMark06 but

a battery backup time of around 4 hours is fabulous; more

than what we got from Acer Travel Mate or Connoi FL-91. Its

Vista performance was also at par though a higher RAM

would have given it an extra edge.

BOTTOMLINE: A limited edition product, it’s meant forthose who desire exclusivity and class.

Asus W5Fe Notebook Price: Rs 94,500 (3 yr warranty)

Key Specs: Core 2 Duo (T7200), 512 MB RAM,1.3 MP Web Cam, FireWire port, 12.1”widescreen, auxiliary LCD display

Contact: Asus Technologies, Mumbai Tel: 67668800 Email: [email protected]

SMS Buy 131191 to 56767

Saurangshu Kanunjna

This new ultraportable TravelMate from Acer is sleek and

light to carry. Acer has given a serious thought toward up-

grading its designs and to be in sync with the current trend,

the inclusion of magnesium alloy into the chassis for robust-

ness is one such example. Strangely, there is no latch to lock

the lid which is a slight disadvantage. Based on the latest In-

tel Santa Rosa Platform it comes with 1 GB RAM and 160 GB

HDD. There is a 12.1” widescreen with native support for

1280x1024 resolution. Con-

nectivity options abound:

there are three USB ports,

FireWire Port, mem-

ory card reader,

Bluetooth etc.

The finger-

print option

provides an

extra layer of se-

curity, though

placement of fingerprint reader could have been a little better

instead of being between the mouse buttons.

Performance wise it fared well in PC Mark05 with a score

of 3644 which is good for this price bracket. This score was

better than that of Connoi FL91. It couldn’t run 3D Mark06

with its onboard graphics, which should not be a concern

atleast for business travelers. In battery test, it fared very well

with a battery backup of 3.32 hr, which is adequate for busi-

ness travelers and is more than what we got from Connoi FL91.

BOTTOMLINE: If your need is of a strong productive ultra-portable notebook, this is a good bet at this price. �

Acer TravelMate 6292Price: Rs 69,999 (1 yr warranty)Key Specs: Intel Core 2 Duo CPU T7100 (1.8GHz, 1 GB RAM, 160 GB HDD), 12.1” WXGALCD, Media Accelerator X3100, DVD R/W, WLAN,Webcam Contact: Acer India, BangaloreTel: 5219520Email: [email protected] Buy 131190 to 56767

Saurangshu Kanunjna

reviews_Dell Inspiron 1720_Asus W5Fe Notebook_final.qxp 10/22/2007 10:03 PM Page 125

Reviews

Amuch improved upgrade to the previous T60p. It has

been specifically designed to meet high end requirements

of power users. A welcome change is the inclusion of power-

ful NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M graphics instead of ATI

Radeon, leading to a boost in overall graphics experience.

Widescreens are a norm these days and T-series is no different

with a 15.4” LCD. Its design is pretty similar to the other

Thinkpads; however, it’s much lighter and sleeker than the

T60p. What’s more, it has a

plethora of features

such as a

finger print

reader, a secu-

rity chip and a

FireWire

port.

It per-

formed pretty

well in all our tests.

In PC Mark05 a mammoth score of 4751 makes it stand tall

among all other notebooks. The Dell Inspiron 1720,

reviewed elsewhere in this issue, scored 3626 in the same

test. In 3D Mark06, though it didn’t beat the Dell Inspiron

1720 but a score of 1606 is still very high compared to

others. Its Vista performance was second to none and a

battery backup time of 3 hours and 53 mins is sufficient for a

frequent traveler.

BOTTOMLINE: Power users, on the look out for a high per-formance notebook with class and elegance, would savorthis one. �

Lenovo Thinkpad T61p Price: Rs 1,65,000 (1 yr warranty)

Key Specs: Core 2 Duo (T7700, 2.40 GHz), 2 GBRAM, NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M, 160GB HDD,UWB chip, Fingerprint reader, Vista Ultimate,15.4” LCDContact: Lenovo India, BangaloreTel: 22108490 Email: [email protected]

SMS Buy 131192 to 56767

Saurangshu Kanunjna

Dell’s completely revampled Inspirion 1720 desktop replace-

ment has a fabulous configuration (see specs box). With 4

GB RAM, two 250 GB hard drives, NVIDIA 8600M GT based

graphics, and even a Blue-ray drive, it’s truly a mean machine

for power users. Its overall multimedia experience was en-

thralling. There’s a DirectMedia Button

to instantly access DVD

movies, music,

photo slide-

shows, and

videos, all with

a pair of good

speakers.

One obvi-

ously ex-

pects

it to outperform all players in the league with such a configu-

ration. In 3D Mark06 however, it beat Lenovo T61p’s (also re-

viewed in this issue) score of 1606, with a score of 2730,

clearly showing its gaming supremacy. In PC Mark05, it

scored 3626, which is high, but lower than T61p’s score of

4751.

In Battery Mark4, it gave a battery backup of around 4

hours and 15 min, which is 30 min more than the T61p.

BOTTOMLINE: It’s a lucrative option for power users, ifthey’re willing to pay the price. �

Dell Inspiron 1720 Price: Rs 1,81,335 (1 yr warranty)Key Specs: Intel Core 2 Duo (T7500, 2.20 GHz), 4GB RAM, two 250 GB HDDs, Blu-ray drive, 17”widescreen, large keyboard with separate numerickeypad, 2 MP Web-cam, Bluetooth 2, 4 USB ports,memory card reader, FireWireContact: Dell India, Bangalore, Tel: 25068026, Website: www.dell.co.inSMS Buy 131193 to 56767

Saurangshu Kanunjna


reviews_thinkpad +acer travelmate 6292.qxp 10/23/2007 7:58 PM Page 1


Reviews

This 15.4” inch notebook from Connoi is based on the lat-

est Intel Santa Rosa Platform and comes with 1 GB of

RAM and 80 GB HDD. Connoi notebooks have been bulky and

robust when it comes to their build and looks, and this too is

no different. But they have worked on the overall outlook of

the notebook and have improved its design, though they could

have still worked on the quality of the Touchpad and the but-

tons. Nevertheless this one hosts loads of features, be it Blue-

tooth, DVD R/W, or Web Cam, it has all that one can ask for

at this price range. It

came preloaded

withVista Ultimate.

Performance wise, you can’t expect a 43k notebook to out-

perform any of the top league players, nonetheless its per-

formance was satisfactory within its range. A score of 2945

in PC Mark is very good for this range of product, though it is

less than that of Acer TravelMate. It didn’t come with any

dedicated graphics processor so the low score in 3D Mark06 is

obvious. In Battery Mark4 it gave a battery backup of about

2.56 hr which is good.

BOTTOMLINE: If you overlook the weight of 2.9 kg, this isa good option for budget conscious business executives �

Connoi FL91 Price: Rs 43,500 (1 yr warranty)

Key Specs: Intel Core 2 Duo (T7100, 1.8 GHz, 1 GB DDR-II RAM, 80 GB HDD, 15.4” WSXGAwidescreen, Intel Graphics GM 965, BroadcomGigabit LAN, DVD R/WContact: Connoiseur Electronics, BangaloreTel: 41152202 Email: [email protected] Buy 131194 to 56767

Saurangshu Kanunjna

DDR2 RAM has reached its maximum limit, supporting 1066

million data transfers per second with a peak transfer rate

of 8,500 Gbps. But with new OSs like Vista, 3D cards and gam-

ing applications, there’s demand for even higher transfer speeds.

That’s why RAM manufacturers are coming out with DDR3

RAM. We received a pair of 1 GB modules of Kingston’s

latest HyperX DDR3 RAM They have blue col-

ored heat spreaders that work quite

well, preventing the RAM

from overheating.

The

modules support

1.9 GHz frequency, and we

tested them in dual mode on a PC

with an Intel Core2Duo E6750 2.66 GHz

processor, an Asus P5k3 Deluxe motherboard, and ATI

Radeon X1950XTX 512 MB graphics card. We ran PCMark 05,

which does a series of read, write, copy and latency tests with a

varying load of 16 MB to 4 KB. The RAM modules scored 5851

PCMarks, which is quite impressive considering the 5900 PC-

Marks scored by Kingston’s DDR2 800 MHz RAM modules we

reviewed last year. This clearly indicates the performance that

DDR3 RAM modules can achieve. This performance however,

will come at the cost of compatibility. They are incompatible

with DDR2 RAM slots owing to their different key notch

location.

BOTTOMLINE: Overall, these RAM modules give excellentperformance, but their cost is still on the higher side compared to equivalent DDR2 modules. �

Kingston HyperX DDR3 RAM Price: 47,000 (Lifetime warranty)

Key Specs: Excellent performance, supports 45 nm based processors

Contact: Avnet India, Ingram Micro, KobianElectronics, Transtek InfowaysEmail:[email protected],Website: www.kingston.com/indiaSMS Buy 131195 to 56767

Karan Bajaj

Reviews Connoi+ _Kingston HyperX DDR3 RAM.qxp 10/22/2007 9:45 PM Page 1


Reviews

PurpleNova Pro is a software that let’s you share your content

online securely and directly along with a feature to host web-

sites and web applications. For this, you don’t need to have a static

public IP. Anybody on a DSL line with a dynamic IP can use it. Each

file hosted through PurpleNova is assigned a URL that can be mailed

and shared with others who could access the hosted content from

their web browsers. The only key requirement is that the PC that

hosts content must always remain connected to the Internet.

The interface to the software is simple and allows all hosting

functionality through one window. Files can be hosted using Files

and Folders tab. A private access option lets the content to be

viewed over SSL. If

you have registered a

domain name, but

don’t have a static IP

or webspace to host

it, then you can use

PurpleNova for the

job. Simply create

your website, map the domain name to it, and you’re online. This

can be a good option for organizations who want to test out their

websites over the Internet without first purchasing hosting space.

The way it works is quite simple. All you need is a local web

server to host your sites. It supports Apache, Tomcat, and IIS. Even

a desktop OS like XP comes with IIS built-in. Simply upload your

website to this web server, and use PurpleNova to create a URL for

it. Only one thing to keep in mind here is that the names of all

hosted apps should be in lowercase.

BOTTOMLINE: Good option for small businesses to hosttheir web site and share content among clients. �

PurpleNova Pro Price: $4.99 (per month)Key Specs: Web hosting of content, SSL protocolsupport for private content; Local web serverapps hostingContact: Infinishare Technologies, PuneTel: 23095855Website: [email protected] Buy 131196 to 56767

Rahul Sah

reviews_perple nova_final.qxp 10/23/2007 9:57 PM Page 1

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Reviews

This NAS box from Buffalo provides a convenient storage for

SOHO environments. It comes with four 7200 rpm, 250 GB

SATA hard drives, which sum up to 1 TB of storage capacity. The

box supports RAID levels 0,1,5 and 10. It has both Gigabit Ether-

net and USB ports to connect it on a network as a NAS or directly

to a PC as a DAS. This TeraStation Live can also be used as a stor-

age server over the Inter-

net. For this, it has a built

in FTP server for easy ex-

change of files. Plus, it

even allows you to share

your files and folders over

the Internet. For this Buf-

falo has setup a separate

website that allows peer

to peer connectivity be-

tween different TeraSta-

tion Live boxes.

To test the NAS we transferred 100 GB of data between the NAS

and a PC with a 400 GB, 7200 rpm HDD. Transfer to the PC took

1 hour and 27 mins, while the transfer back to the NAS took 1

hour 36 secs. FTP transfer however was much faster, and took

only 57 mins. We also ran NetBench and got a maximum

throughput of 33 MBps with RAID 0, which is pretty average as

compared to the cheaper TeraStation Pro II (reviewed in June

2007). The latter also has a higher transfer rate.

BOTTOMLINE: Choose this if you need a high capacity NASbox for a small office. �

Buffalo TeraStation Live NAS Price: Rs 55,590 (2 yr warranty)

Key Specs: RAID 0/1/5/10, 7200 rpm, powerbackup, hot swappable drives, web-based filesharing, FTP server

Contact: Advent Infotech, Delhi Tel: 41436752, Email: [email protected]; www.buffalo-asia.com

SMS Buy 131198 to 56767

Rakesh Sharma

The Asus P5K3 Deluxe WiFi-AP edition motherboard comes

with integrated WiFi, which can be configured in software

access point or station mode. Like most high-end motherboards,

this also has a heat pipe running from North to South bridge, but

unlike others, it has an extra fan mounted over the heat pipe for

extra cooling. The board supports up to 8 GB DDR3 RAM, has 2

PCI Express x16, 2 PCI Express x1, and 3 PCI 2.2 slots along with

dual Gigabit LAN controller. It has 6 SATA ports which support

RAID 0 and 1. Plus, it supports 2 external SATA ports, 1

FireWire, and 6 USB 2.0/1.1 ports. It

doesn’t have a PS2 port for

mouse, so one

needs

to

get a

USB mouse

to work with.

The perform-

ance of this mother-

board is good. We tested it with an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.6 GHz

processor, 1 GB DDR3 RAM and an ATI Radeon X1950 series

graphics card. In 3D Mark 05 and 06, it scored 12746 and 6538,

respectively, which are good scores. As compared to Gigabyte

P35-DQ6 (also reviewed this month) the performance is a little

better. In PCMark 05 also, it scored 7019 PCMarks, which is

better than most high-end motherboards. In Doom 3, this

motherboard clocked up to 216 fps and its score in

CINEBENCH10 was also very good.

BOTTOM LINE: Being a 45 nm processor-ready motherboard

and having DDR3 memory support, makes it a worthy buy.

Asus P5K3 Deluxe Motherboard Price: Rs 17,100 (3 yrs warranty)Key Specs: WiFi, Dual Gbe LAN ports, 6 USBports, 2 PCI-E X16 ports, DDR3, CrossFire, meantfor gaming PCs, support for Intel’s 45 nm CPUsContact: ASUS Technology Tel: 6766 8800, Email: [email protected] Buy 131191 to 56767

Rakesh Sharma

�


reviews_TeraStation Live NAS box_final.qxp 10/24/2007 9:57 AM Page 1


Reviews

This high-end gamers’ board is based on the all new Intel

P35/ICH9R chipset, which allows an FSB of 1.3 GHz. This

chipset has support for DDR 3 RAM, but this board doesn’t

come with this featuure. The board also supports 45 nm CPUs,

and comes with 4 memory slots that support up to 8 GB DDR2

RAM. Like other boards in its price range, this also has a heat-

pipe running from North to South bridge, for better cooling.

Apart from 6 SATA II ports, it also has 2 GSATA II (Gigabyte

SATA) connectors, which support RAID 0, 1 and JBOD.

This motherboard was a good performer. We tested it with

an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.6 GHz, 1 GB DDR2 RAM, and Radeon

X1950 series graphics card. It gave good performance in all the

benchmarks, but the results were slightly lower than the Asus

P5K3 motherboard (also reviewed this month). In 3D Mark 05

and 06, its scores were 12306 and 6021, respectively. In PC

Mark 2005, it scored 6006 PCMarks. In Doom 3, it scored 196

fps, while in CINEBENCH 10 it clocked 3785 CB-CPU.

BOTTOM LINE: Overall, though its scores are slightlylower than P5K3, its lower price makes up for that, andmakes it a worthy buy. �

Gigabyte P35-DQ6 Motherboard Price: Rs 15,500 (3 yrs warranty)

Key Specs: New P35/ICH 9R chipset, ATICrossFire and 45 nm CPU support, 2 PCI, 2 PCI-E x16, & 3 x1 slots, 6 SATA II ports, RAID 0, 1, 5,& 10; 12 USB, 2 FireWire, & GbE port

Contact: Gigabyte Technology, MumbaiTel: 30616666, Email: [email protected]

SMS Buy 131179 to 56767

Rakesh Sharma

This SLI ready motherboard having NVIDIA nForce 650i

chipset supports Intel Core2 Extreme, Core 2 Quad, Core

2 Duo, Pentium D, Pentium 4 and Celeron D processors. This

motherboard is meant for budget conscious buyers, especially

those on the lookout for high end performance and gaming

motherboards. It features 2 PCI Express x16 slots, 2 PCI Ex-

press x1 and three 32-bit PCI v2.3 compliant slots. Apart from

these it also has 2 IDE, 4 SATA and 1 onboard Gigabit LAN

port. On the back panel one can find 4 USB, 1 serial and 2 PS/2

ports.

We tested it using Intel Core 2 Duo 2.6 GHz processor with

1 GB RAM, Windows XP SP1 and 120

GB HDD. In 3D Mark 05 and

06 the scores were

12,664

3D

Marks and

6,466 3D Marks,

which are even better

than the high-end Asus P5K3 (reviewed this month). In PC

Mark 05 this motherboard crossed Gigabyte P53-DQ6 (re-

viewed this month) with a score of 6,979 PCMarks. In Doom3,

it gave a maximum of 198.5 FPS which is again a good score.

In CINEBENCH 10, when rendering with a single CPU, it gave

2,721 CB-CPU and rendering with two CPUs it gave 5007 CB-

CPU, slightly less than Asus P5K3.

BOTTOMLINE: A great deal if you’re looking for a highperformance motherboard with decent features at acheap price.

ECS NF650iSLIT-A Motherboard Price: Rs 4,500 ( 3 yr warranty ) Key Specs: SLI support, Gigabit Ethernet, IntelCore 2 Extreme processor Contact: ZENITH TECHNOLOGIES, MumbaiTel: 28377300Email: [email protected] Buy 131180 to 56767

Rakesh Sharma

�

reviews_Gigabyte P35-DQ6_final.qxp 10/23/2007 11:24 PM Page 1

Books


Targeted basically at IT professionals, this book

provides 7 guidelines (mantras) to steer a proj-

ect to success. With its easy and lucid language, this

book gives a reader the sense to correlate himself

with the given examples and use them in his life. This

book concentrates on project management and pres-

ents an innovative approach to managing project

challenges. The first section begins with prospective

vulnerabilities in project management. The subse-

quent section explains how an exemplary project

management framework can be rolled out in a large organiza-

tion having 1000+ PMs/PLs, across four geographies, viz.,

India, the US, the UK, and the APAC. The example uses a unique

snowballing methodology and an innovative concept called

Chainge Management. In the last segment, the book explains

the conceptual base of each of the seven mantras.

Steering Project Success

�

This book teaches you how to program in C. One of

the major features of this book is inclusion of

C 99. The book also includes two new chapters that

discuss how to debug C programs and give the reader

an overview of the pervasive field of Object Oriented

Programming or OOP.

In all, this book contains 19 chapters that cover

fundamentals of C, how to compile and run your first

program, input and output operations, and about their

advance features.

The last two chapters cover debugging techniques. The

popular gdb debugger is used to explain the debugging process.

The last chapter of the book covers Object Oriented Program-

ming fundamentals. All chapters contain really helpful exer-

cises. We can say that this book is a good tutorial and it really

helps you to brush up your C programming. �

If you know a little bit of VBA programming or

even if you’re a fresher, then this book can help

you get the most out of your Microsoft Office Suite.

It teaches you how to automate routine office tasks

using basic VBA programming.

This book tells you about how to write programs

that will let you control Word, Excel, PowerPoint,

Access database, and even Outlook e-mail. There is

a bundle of examples in this book, all based on the Office

2007 applications.

A few topics that have been covered in this book are Pro-

gram Access Databases, Automate Document Backups, Create

Advanced Email Rules, Build Custom Dialog Boxes, Control

Macro Security and more. Overall, a great book for developers

of all levels wanting to program Microsoft Office Suites. �

Author: Madhavan S Rao

Price: Rs 450

Pages: 228

Distributor: Tata McGraw-Hill, DelhiTel: 4383400 E-mail: priyanka_ [email protected] Buy 131151 to 56767

Author: Stephen G Kochan

Price: Rs 299

Pages: 543

Distributor: Pearson Education, DelhiTel: 43030215 E-mail: [email protected] Buy 131152 to 56767

Authors: Paul McFedriesel

Price: Rs 350

Pages: 406

Distributor: Pearson Education, DelhiTel: 43030215E-mail: [email protected] SMS Buy 131153 to 56767

Programming in C (Third edition)

VBA for the 2007 Microsoft Office System

book review_final.qxp 10/24/2007 9:22 AM Page 144


25 New Information InfrastructureProductsIn one of its major Indian launches recently, EMC announced

25 new information infrastructure products and solutions.

Here are some of the important ones. The CLARiiON CX3-10

FC/iSCSI System that can scale to 30 TB of capacity. It features

combined Fibre Channel (FC) and iSCSI connectivity within the

same array. The Symmetrix DMX-4 series features an end-to-

end 4 Gbps architecture, a new FC point-to-point back-end.

They support both high speed FC disk drives and new low-cost

750 GB SATA II disk drives that, according to the company, can

reduce energy consumption by up to 33 percent. The newest

generation of EMC Centera, a content addressed storage (CAS)

system, which has specifically been designed with low-power

processors and chipsets, adaptive cooling and more efficient

power supplies to reduce energy consumption, while also offer-

ing 50 percent more storage capacity per node using new 750

GB SATA disk drives. EMC NetWorker support for De-duplica-

tion and Continuous Data Protection (CDP), RecoverPoint,

Rainfinity File Management Appliance (FMA), and 6 enterprise

content management (ECM) platforms based on Documentum

are the other few that need a mention.

SMS Buy131122 to 56767

News & Launches

TI's Floating-Point Starter KitTexas Instruments has introduced floating-point

TMS320F2833x digital signal controllers (DSCs) by intro-

ducing the F28335 eZdsp starter kit. Now sampling, the

F28335 controller is a floating-point DSC, supplying devel-

opers of industrial systems with the inherent floating-point

advantages of performance and simplified software develop-

ment over fixed-point devices. The simplified software devel-

opment and performance boost common to floating-point

processors offer better power efficiency for greener indus-

trial applications. For example, the F2833x devices enable

variable speed alternating current (AC) drives, which use

one-eighth the energy compared to constant speed counter-

parts. The floating-point devices also enable clean energy

through solar power inverters that more efficiently convert

energy from photovoltaic (PV) panels.

SMS Buy131123 to 56767

ProCurve's 8212 Core SwitchProCurve Networking has announced the availability of an

enterprise-class network core switch, the ProCurve Switch

8212zl. The core switch completes ProCurve’s core-to-edge

network solution that unifies network technology, infra- �

news_November 07_final.qxp 10/23/2007 10:03 PM Page 133

News & Launches

Backup on VMware by EMCHere comes a combo of data de-duplication backup solutions

from EMC, designed for virtualized environments. New EMC

Avamar Virtual Edition for VMware Infrastructure is fully virtu-

alized de-duplication solution for backup and recovery. In addi-

tion, EMC is introducing the new EMC Avamar Data Store, a

complete, packaged solution consisting of leading EMC Avamar

data de-duplication backup and recovery software running on

pre-configured EMC-certified hardware.

SMS Buy131013 to 56767

AMD’s ambitious x86 ProcessorAMD introduces its much talked about native x86 microproces-

sor, Quad-Core AMD Opteron. It is specifically designed for the

energy hogging data centers, and promises good performance-

per-watt for servers. According to the company, it improves en-

ergy efficiency by 50 percent in integer and floating-point

operations, enhances virtualization performance, and protects

investment via a user-centric approach enabling non-disruptive

transitions from dual- to quad-core within the same power and

thermal envelopes to help keep infrastructure costs down.

SMS Buy131014 to 56767

CISCO presents 802.11n wirelessCisco introduced an integrated 802.11n solution designed to com-

bine wireless performance and reliability with simplicity of deploy-

ment. Cisco’s Unified Wireless Network offering includes the modu-

lar Cisco Aironet 1250 Series access point, an enterprise-class 11n

access point, as well as the 48 Gbps scalable Cisco Catalyst 6500-

based wireless local-area network controller system, and wired and

wireless services with the Release 4.2. Cisco will also deliver, via its

family of Catalyst switches, the ability to fully power the dual-radio

Aironet 1250 Series from a single Ethernet port.

SMS Buy131015 to 56767

NetApp’s new FAS appliancesNetwork Appliance unveiled FAS2020 and FAS2050 of its new

FAS2000 series of fabric attached storage. With a host of connec-

tivity options and support for almost all prevalent protocols, it of-

fers deployment versatility and connectivity to satisfy

your data protection, recovery, and storage scalability needs. It

supports dual controller active-active (HA) throughput, high-per-

formance SAS infrastructure, 4 Gigabit FC from end to end, and

onboard remote platform management.

SMS Buy131016 to 56767

news_october 07_anil.qxp 9/24/2007 12:37 AM Page 126

147 A CYBERMEDIA PublicationPCQUEST S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 7

News & Launches


structure, software, operation, man-

agement and support. The switch

comes with ProCurve’s lifetime war-

ranty and it is based on HP-developed

ProVision ASIC technology, a highly

integrated architecture that delivers

redundancy and resiliency. ProCurve

also announced the ProCurve Wireless

Edge Services zl Module that adds cen-

tralized wireless local area network

(WLAN) configuration, management

and advanced wireless services to the

8212zl core switch and 5400zl edge

switch family.

SMS Buy131121 to 56767

SNIA completes 10 years,reaffirms its

missionThe Storage Networking Industry Asso-

ciation (SNIA) unveiled an expanded

mission and vision that positions the

association to lead the industry in de-

veloping and promoting standards,

technologies, and educational services

to empower organizations in the man-

agement of information. Unveiled on

the association's 10th anniversary, the

SNIA also launched new branding,

which includes a website redesign and

a new logo in support of the associa-

tion's forward-looking mission and vi-

sion. SNIA India was formally

launched in Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai

and Pune and now holds membership

strength of over 87 members. Owing to

its superlative performance, it has re-

cently been awarded independent sta-

tus by SNIA International Board.

Symantec’s Storage UnitedSymantec has launched Storage United

that provides a comprehensive layer of

data protection, storage management

and archiving software. As a result en-

terprises will have flexibility and con-

trol over their storage and server

architecture and hardware purchases.

The launch was announced at Syman-

tec Vision,2007, in Mumbai, an event

organized by Symantec. The event fo-

cused on various security problems

faced by individuals and enterprises

and guided them with various solu-

tions and ways to solve through differ-

ent sessions. Delegates could also get a

first hand demo of some of Symantec’s

latest products and

solutions.

SMS Buy131124 to 56767

HP's Green InitiativeHP has announced the availability of

its Adaptive Infrastructure services,

part of its green initiative for making

existing and upcoming data centers

more energy efficient, in India. The

solution offering includes Dynamic

Smart Cooling (DSC) technology that

helps tackle one of the most critical

issues in today’s data centers, that is,

power and cooling. DSC enables to

change data center energy costs from a

fixed to a variable cost, significantly

increasing IT scaling headroom.

BladeSystem c-Class that, according to

the company, uses up to 27 percent less

power than competition products in

similar configurations. The company

claims that with this blade server offer-

ing, an average enterprise data center

can realize over a three-year period:

system acquisition cost savings of up to

41 percent; data center facilities cost

savings of up to 60 percent; and initial

system setup time cost savings of up to

96 percent. HP claims that its 'green'

storage technology can cut storage

array power and cooling costs in data

centers by 50 percent, besides it offers

consultancy to harness opportunity for

power savings through server and stor-

age virtualization.

SMS Buy131125 to 56767 �

news_november 07_final.qxp 10/23/2007 10:05 PM Page 134

The Revenue Generator

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ADVERTISERS’ INDEXAdvt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Website . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pg. No. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pims Code

ABP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181039

Accenture . . . . . . . . . . . www.accenture.com/india . . . . . . . . . . 85 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181085

Adline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.adlinesystems.com . . . . . . . . . . 115 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1810115

Akna Infotech . . . . . . . . www.aknaInfotech.com . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181023

APC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.apc.com/promo . . . . . . . . . . . . . IFC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181000

Carizen . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.carizen.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181079

Cat computers . . . . . . . www.quickheal.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1810121

DSF quarter page . . . . . www.gadgets.in/battery-adapter . . . . . 129 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1810129

ELITECORE . . . . . . . . . www.cyberoam.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181037

Eset . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.eset.com/partner . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181025

Evolve Brands Pvt. Ltd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181007

F-Secure . . . . . . . . . . . . www.f-secure.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181027

Gigabyte . . . . . . . . . . . . www.gigabyte.in . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181055

IBM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.ibm.com Cover . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136A IBC . . . . . . . . . . . . 1810IBC

ICICI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181021

Intec . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.intecbilling.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . BC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1810BC

Interface . . . . . . . . . . . . www.icplindia.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181027

Lenovo . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.lenovo.com/in . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181005

Manipal Univweral . . . . www.mediamangroup.com . . . . . . . . . 33 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181033

Mediaman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181091

Microsoft . . . . . . . . . . . . www.microsoft.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181003

Microsoft India Ltd.- . . . www.microsoft.com/india/connections/tac 3,9,17 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181003

Quantum link . . . . . . . . . www.qlc.in . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181031

Rashi Peripherals . . . . . www.procurve.com/partners . . . . . . . 13 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181013

Reliance/ LD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181013

resellerBrand . . . . . . . . www.resellerbrand.ws . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28,29 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181028

Ricoh www.ricoh.co.in . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181065

Samsung India Pvt. Ltd. Email: [email protected] . 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181001

Soft Aid . . . . . . . . . . . . www.visitor-management.net . . . . . . . 12 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181012

Valrack . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.valrack.in . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181073

Viewsonic . . . . . . . . . . . www.in.viewsonic.com . . . . . . . . . . . . 117 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1810117

Wyse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.wyse.co.in . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1810134

advertisers indexOcto07.qxp 10/24/2007 1:44 AM Page 135

RFID technology needs no introduction. It’s beenaround for a long time, and one has heard ofmany success stories of how it’s helped many

organizations in smoothening their inventory manage-ment and asset management. What’s new is Microsoft’sentry into this hot area, with an interesting solution.Called BizTalk RFID, the solution is meant to allow Microsoft’s partners to develop customized RFIDbased solutions for customers. Apart from the fact thatRFID is a hot area, one key reason Microsoft has en-tered this space is because this space is still highly frag-mented. There’s no common standard being followedby anybody, nor is there a common set of protocols.

Everybody follows their own communications pro-tocols and standards. Therefore, it becomes very difficult for one to manage a RFID based solutions. Microsoft aims to tackle all these challenges by provid-ing a common platform that provides a uniform way todiscover, communicate, and manage RFID devices.The platform architecture is such that it can allow allkinds of RFID devices—current ones, older generationones, next generation ones, etc, to be incorporated easily. For this, a special Device Service Provider Inter-

face has been added, which provides a generic set ofAPIs for RFID hardware vendors to ensure that theirproducts work seamlessly on it.Next big thing in the architecture of BizTalk RFID is anEngine and Runtime layer. This allows developers tocreate, deploy and manage logical RFID processes.They can build complete workflow solution for an organization on this engine. Moreover, Microsoft isalso providing adapters to integrate RFID solutionswith other LoB applications like ERP, Warehouse Man-agement Systems, or other similar apps. There are many advantages to this approach, as pointedout by MS. One is that it’s based on the .NET platform,so developers already have a familiar platform to develop RFID based solutions. Second, the solutioncan work well with other MS applications like SQLServer, BizTalk server, Windows Workflow Founda-tion, and even Microsoft Dynamics. Lastly, the solutionprovides two other tools-- an administrative consolecalled “RFID Manager” and a ’Rule Composer tool,’which as the name suggests is meant to compose rules.

The solution sounds promising, and many success-ful solutions have been developed using the sameworldwide. Whether it will succeed in India remains tobe seen.


Extraedge


Microsoft’s BizTalk RFID

Saurangshu Kanunjna

A new solution to help organizations build RFID based business solutions. It separates the business logic fromthe underlying RFID devices, making it easier to build RFID based workflows

�

An RFID device being shown using BizTalk RFID as a background

solution for tracing shipment of goods

Sourc

e:

Mic

rosoft C

rop., 2

006

ExtraEdge Biztalk RFID_LP2.qxp 10/23/2007 11:24 PM Page 136

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