The overall idea is that you set up a port on the local computer to forward all traffic to a port on the remote computer. Then you use remote desktop to “remote” into the _local computer_, but because the traffic gets forwarded, you actually connect to the remote one. The one little catch is that Windows doesn’t think you should remote desktop to your own computer, so you can’t just use “localhost”, instead you can use 127.254.254.254, which will still route to the localhost, but won’t register to remote desktop as a circular reference.

1. Download and run putty.exe.

2. On the “Session” tab (the default one)
Under the Host Name, put:
your-account@hostname.com
Leave the Port at 22, and the connection type at SSH

3. Click the “Connection” tab on the side, and drill down to SSH and “Tunnels”

4. Under “Source Port”:
Enter 127.254.254.254:3389
(yes it is a little box, but put in this whole IP address).
This is an IP address that will map to the “local host” ip address, but because it’s not just “localhost” Windows will not “detect” the circular reference and let it through when you try to do the remote desktop. The port 3389 is the default port for remote desktop.

5. Under “Destination”, put the IP address you want to connect to (ie, the static internal IP address of the computer as if you were inside the network.)
So this will be something like 192.168.29.18:3389.

6. Go back to the session tab.
In the Saved Sessions box, type: “rd port forward” or something like that, and click “Save.”
Then for future use, you can simply select this session and have everything set up.

7. Click “open” and supply your account password. This will log you into a standard SSH session, but in addition, it will be forwarding traffic on port 3389 to the supplied one.
Leave this SSH window open in the background while you remote desktop in.

8. Run Remote Desktop.
(I click Start -> Run, and then type “mstsc” (Microsoft terminial services client) to run it.)
Under the computer name type: “127.254.254.254″
Again this will refer to “localhost” but then putty will redirect this port to the one on the remote computer.

9. Login to the remote computer and enjoy!

If you’re new to gnuplot, you might want to get out now while you still can

The box and whiskers plot

There are a few different styles of box and whiskers plots and this link gives a pretty good description.

The two gotchas for were what values you need and in what order. These scripts are set up to use the following columns, in order:

• X value (for ordering left-right across the graph)
• Min
• 1st Quartile
• Median
• 3rd Quartile
• Max

The other gotcha I had was wanting to have labels across the x-axis rather than numbers. To accomplish this, I added a 7th column with the label, then I used the following:

set xrange[0:3]
set yrange[0:10]

# Data columns: X Min 1stQuartile Median 3rdQuartile Max Titles
set bars 4.0
set style fill empty
plot 'data.csv' using 1:3:2:6:5:xticlabels(7) with candlesticks title 'Quartiles' whiskerbars, \
  ''         using 1:4:4:4:4 with candlesticks lt -1 notitle

The xticlabels(7) is the key to the x-axis labels, saying to use the values from column 7 for the labels.

TITLE: SQL Server Setup failure.

——————————

SQL Server Setup has encountered the following error:

Invoke or BeginInvoke cannot be called on a control until the window handle has been created..

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BUTTONS:

OK

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You can use Tortoise SVN to access a repository over ssh by simply changing your url to be something along the lines of:

svn+ssh://myuser@mysite.com/users/myuser/svnroot

but then you are repeatedly given the password dialog, with no option to save or cache your password.

The way to get around this is to use ssh and keep the store the key in your pageant list.  So essentially the steps are:

1. Create a .ssh dir under your home directory on the server
2. Generate a public and private key on the server, and put the public key in your ssh dir
3. Convert the private key to the format Putty likes (using puttygen.exe)
4. Create a saved session in Putty for logging into your server with your private key
5. Have pageant.exe running and add the private key to the list stored in pageant, so you don’t have to continue to enter the passphrase
6. Change your repository URL to have your putty saved session as the “server” rather than “myuser@mysite.com”

The following two sites do a great job of walking through the details of how to do each step above:

• http://tortoisesvn.net/ssh_howto
• http://support.tigertech.net/tortoise-svn

However, when trying to import my private key into puttygen, I received the error:

“Couldn’t load private key (ciphers other than DES-EDE3-CBC not supported)”

Which I solved by getting a different snapshot of putty gen from: http://tartarus.org/~simon/putty-snapshots/x86/puttygen.exe (as described on : http://winscp.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8324).

After downloading the install from Microsoft and running it, I received the following error:

“SQLManagementStudio_x64_ENU.exe is not a valid Win32 Application”

I assumed I had some weird versioning issue, and read all kinds of blogs about internal db’s included with Windows Server, etc.  Come to find out, the download was corrupted, and re-downloading the file, solved my problem.

So in the end it was trivial, but I figured I would post about it, because the error message wasn’t very telling of what was actually happening.

Creating a new configuration:

1. Build -> Configuration Manager
2. In the drop down of current configurations, go all the way to the bottom and select “Add new…”
3. You can choose to copy settings from an existing configuration (such as debug or release)
4. If you are on the solution configuration drop down, there is a box to create a matching configuration for ALL of your projects
5. If you are on a project configuration drop down, there is a box to create a matching configuration for the solution

Creating a new web.config transform file for the new configuration

Once you have created a new configuration you can set up specific web config rules for it.

1. Right click the web config file in the project
2. Select “Add Config Transforms”
3. This will add a new config transform named web.[my-configuration-name-here].config that is grouped underneath web.config in the solution explorer.
4. You can now use this to add some “transforms” to the web config for that specific build configuration, such as turning off debug params or changing the db connection string

Setting package/publish options

1. Right click the web application project
2. Select “Package/Publish Settings”
3. Alternatively, you can get to it by selecting project properties and then the “Package/Publish Web” tab
4. Change settings as appropriate
5. Note: there is also a tab for package/publish SQL options if you want it to handle DB stuff as well

Building a deployment package

1. Right click the project
2. Select Build Deployment package
3. The default location for this to build to is /[my-project-name]/obj/[my-configuration-name/Package

Microsoft JScript runtime error: AjaxControlToolkit requires ASP.NET Ajax 4.0 scripts. Ensure the correct version of the scripts are referenced. If you are using an ASP.NET ScriptManager, switch to the ToolkitScriptManager in AjaxControlToolkit.dll.

I believe there are many other problems which can cause this symptom, but in my case, as the error message says, the solution is that you need to include the “ToolkitScriptManager” rather than the standard “ScriptManager”

To add the ToolkitScriptManager, you first need to include the assembly namespace on your aspx page.

<%@ Register Assembly="AjaxControlToolkit" Namespace="AjaxControlToolkit"
TagPrefix="asp" %>

If you control is right on your main page, chances are you have already done this.  But in my case the Ajax control was embedded in a user control, so I didn’t have it on the main page yet.

Then you can simply include the manager by changing the standard script manager

<asp:ScriptManager ID="scriptMaster" runat="server"></asp:ScriptManager>

to this:

<asp:ToolkitScriptManager ID="toolkitScriptMaster" runat="server">
</asp:ToolkitScriptManager>

Environment: Visual Studio 2008, ASP.Net 3.5

Here is a summary of some of the problems I encountered and the eventual path I took.

Support for Windows Server 2008 R2
In the official release notes, only Windows Server 2008 (not R2) is listed. But the release notes predate the release of R2, so it was a little bit up in the air. The word from support was essentially it was supported as long as there weren’t any problems–not really what I had hoped for.

I decide to try the install anyway, and hoped things would work out.  During the install, it proceeded to the point of trying to start the initial docbroker and gave the following error message:

Error – The service did not respond to the start of control request in a timely fashion

Trying to start the service manually from the Administrative Tools -> Services, gave the same result.  I tried many different things involving disabling firewalls and adding more permissions and was unsuccessful.

I ultimately decided to switch back to Windows Server 2008 (not R2), and the docbroker started up just fine.

64 Bit Support and Documentum 6.5 SP3 (as opposed to SP2)

After working through some other issues with regard to Sql Server connections (which I’ll document in another post) I finally made it through the install “successfully” (without it erroring out).

But then when I opened the Documentum Server Manager, my Docbase did not display in the list and neither did my Docbroker.

It was at this point that Documentum released a new service pack (6.5 SP3).  One of the biggest differences I noticed in the release notes was that in 6.5 SP2 they listed support for 64 bit operating systems with an asterisk that said, the server would run in 32 bit emulation mode.  In SP3 this limitation was not listed, so I assumed this means the server will now actually take advantage of the 64 bit machine.

Given the fact that I wasn’t having much success anyway, I completely uninstalled 6.5 SP2 and reinstalled this time with 6.5 SP3.  At this point when the install finished, my Docbase and Docbroker showed up just fine in the list.

Then, in discussing grading for the project, we went over the way that they would give scores to themselves and their teammates in various capacities. Each one will be a 5 point scale with 0 representing complete failure in an area and 4 representing meeting expectations. A score of 5 would indicated an area where they had gone above and beyond what was needed. For example, in teamwork, a 4 represents completing assigned tasks thoroughly and efficiently, but a 5 means the student took initiative in seeking out others tasks, making sure they were complete and generally exceeding expectations in leadership.

The question was asked, therefore, if completing “additional features” was necessary for an ‘A’ grade, or if fulfilling the base requirements was sufficient. It made me stop to reflect on what grades have become.

There should be a way to reward a student that consistently exceeds expectations. But a 110% ‘A’ doesn’t look any different than a 94% ‘A’ on their transcript. Perhaps the system was designed for ‘C’ to really be average, but my experience has been that expectations have changed across the board, and that an ‘A’ really means: base requirements fulfilled as needed.

After setting up the file system and creating the application, I tried to load the default document in a browser and got:

HTTP Error 500.19 – Internal Server Error

The requested page cannot be accessed because the related configuration data for the page is invalid.

Module IIS Web Core Notification BeginRequest Handler Not yet determined Error Code 0×80070021 Config Error This configuration section cannot be used at this path. This happens when the section is locked at a parent level. Locking is either by default (overrideModeDefault=”Deny”), or set explicitly by a location tag with overrideMode=”Deny” or the legacy allowOverride=”false”.

The solution was to make a change in the applicationHost.config file.

1. Browse to “C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv\config” (you will need administrator rights here)
2. Open applicationHost.config
3. Find the section that showed up in the “config source” part of the error message page.  For me this has typically been “modules” or “handlers”
4. Change the overrideModeDefault attribute to be “Allow”
5. So the whole line now looks like:

<section name="modules" allowDefinition="MachineToApplication" overrideModeDefault="Allow" />

After saving the file, the page loaded up fine in my browser.