by community-syndication | Jul 30, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
During our crusade for Home Server and Beta programs we faced a multitude of home network configurations. We learned a lot, and some of that we did not like. In fact, that’s our beta-participants who did not like that, it’s just they did not know what it is until we did investigations on the failing sytems. Now we know.
Let me share a few points on how the choice of your router can impact you, not just with Windows Home Server, but with any computers, Windows or not. Ever had a complain of a child that they need mom’s computer to print a school report, because their computer “does not print”?
Routers is the most important piece of home network infrastructure, especially because most people set it right after cable or DSL modem and allow all the home machine to be connected to it. Here are in my opinion the worst things the router may do or have:
- Rejection-based firewall
Some routers allow all traffic and only allow block a few specific ports of addresses. To make this worse, they may have a limited space for rules, hence allowing to block only a few ports. Fortunately they are also too dumb to be able to route incoming traffic, which alleviates most of security pains, but still leaves the home network pretty open, compared to permission-based firewalls, where all traffic is porhibited and opened for specific ports, with most popular ports preconfigured.
- No name resolution or name resolution that does not include local DHCP-managed hosts
Some routers give out IP addresses over DHCP but don’t bother to provide name resolution for them. As a result, home network machines cannot access each other. You can do a few tricks using workgroups with WINS or static IPs, but it’s so better when a reasonable local name resolution is available.
- Blocking some internal traffic
That’s why UPnP may not work. Not just with WHS, but also with your Roku and other media streaming devices. Devices consuming media over network depend on UPnP discovery process. It may also interfere with file and printer sharing – a bad thing on Internet but very important inside the house.
- HTTP Proxy and HTTP Proxy configuration
Looks like a cool idea, right? Especially, if you can configure parental control to restrict your child browsing with it. Parental control may be an important thing, but there are other ways to implemnet it on a router. As to the proxy, you need a real good implementation, which should be also bound with local name resolution for everything to work right. It occurs that some proxies in some routers out there are not implemented right.
- Limited bandwidth
This one came as a surprise to me. Early in the game we decided that Windows Home Server will not be used as a boundary machine. Really, if you put a lot of sensitive data on it, you don’t want it be directly connected to Internet. To my surprise, on a Russian forum on WHS (yes, we have one, WHS Beta was surprisingly popular there), a lot of people were asking if they could do that. When I asked why, the truth revealed itself. It happened that Windows Server 2003, which is the base on which Windows Home Server is built, is sometimes 10 times faster as a router than off-the-shelf gigabit routers. Apparently, gigabit network cards is not the only factor that defines your Internet speed.
I probably missed some problems like UI configuration usability, but it feels to me these are the big five. What would you add t this list?
by community-syndication | Jul 30, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
During our crusade for Home Server and Beta programs we faced a multitude of home network configurations. We learned a lot, and some of that we did not like. In fact, that’s our beta-participants who did not like that, it’s just they did not know what it is until we did investigations on the failing sytems. Now we know.
Let me share a few points on how the choice of your router can impact you, not just with Windows Home Server, but with any computers, Windows or not. Ever had a complain of a child that they need mom’s computer to print a school report, because their computer “does not print”?
Routers is the most important piece of home network infrastructure, especially because most people set it right after cable or DSL modem and allow all the home machine to be connected to it. Here are in my opinion the worst things the router may do or have:
- Rejection-based firewall
Some routers allow all traffic and only allow block a few specific ports of addresses. To make this worse, they may have a limited space for rules, hence allowing to block only a few ports. Fortunately they are also too dumb to be able to route incoming traffic, which alleviates most of security pains, but still leaves the home network pretty open, compared to permission-based firewalls, where all traffic is porhibited and opened for specific ports, with most popular ports preconfigured.
- No name resolution or name resolution that does not include local DHCP-managed hosts
Some routers give out IP addresses over DHCP but don’t bother to provide name resolution for them. As a result, home network machines cannot access each other. You can do a few tricks using workgroups with WINS or static IPs, but it’s so better when a reasonable local name resolution is available.
- Blocking some internal traffic
That’s why UPnP may not work. Not just with WHS, but also with your Roku and other media streaming devices. Devices consuming media over network depend on UPnP discovery process. It may also interfere with file and printer sharing – a bad thing on Internet but very important inside the house.
- HTTP Proxy and HTTP Proxy configuration
Looks like a cool idea, right? Especially, if you can configure parental control to restrict your child browsing with it. Parental control may be an important thing, but there are other ways to implemnet it on a router. As to the proxy, you need a real good implementation, which should be also bound with local name resolution for everything to work right. It occurs that some proxies in some routers out there are not implemented right.
- Limited bandwidth
This one came as a surprise to me. Early in the game we decided that Windows Home Server will not be used as a boundary machine. Really, if you put a lot of sensitive data on it, you don’t want it be directly connected to Internet. To my surprise, on a Russian forum on WHS (yes, we have one, WHS Beta was surprisingly popular there), a lot of people were asking if they could do that. When I asked why, the truth revealed itself. It happened that Windows Server 2003, which is the base on which Windows Home Server is built, is sometimes 10 times faster as a router than off-the-shelf gigabit routers. Apparently, gigabit network cards is not the only factor that defines your Internet speed.
I probably missed some problems like UI configuration usability, but it feels to me these are the big five. What would you add t this list?
by community-syndication | Jul 30, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Chris and Mike confirm the details of the upcoming SOA and Business Process conference in October 2007.
I was fortunate enough to attend last year’s event, and would highly encourage folks to attend this year. It’s a great place to meet up in person with BizTalk community folks and receive a fair mix of high […]
by community-syndication | Jul 30, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Hi folks, I’m busily preparing for TechEd2007 and one of my session is developer
focused about Workflow in Microsoft Sharepoint.
This will be where all my slides and sample code will be shortly 🙂
See you soon…..
by community-syndication | Jul 30, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
What happens to downstream SOAP recipients if the message sent from BizTalk is a different “version” than the original?
Let’s assume I have an enterprise schema that represents my company’s employees (e.g. “Workforce”). BizTalk receives this object from SAP and fans it out to a variety of downstream systems (via SOAP). Because direct messaging […]
by community-syndication | Jul 29, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
I recently was working for a company who needed to store data coming in from the 837 claim into a database.
Experiencing many poorly designed databases to store claim data before, I create a database structure that will capture what the client was looking for, but also allow easy implementation of additional values to be captured into the database as use of this process increased. Now my goal/issue was to get BizTalk to take the 837 data and insert all of the data into the various tables.
For the purposes of this blog, I have simplified the example, but the concepts are the same.
The first thing I have done is created a psuedo837Claim schema, that looks somewhat like the 837 schema looks like. In the picture, I have marked what is repeatable.
The next thing I have done is created the database structure:
So now I need to start generating the schemas that represented the web I have just created. We will start by following Steve Kaufman’s guidance hereand creating an at-identity schema that we will use throughout the process. Once I have completed that, I generate the Header schema from the Header table. I select all of the columns (as I will for all but the end, but we will get to that later).
Then for the purposes of this blog, I will import the Application table. Here comes the modifcations. Once I have imported the Application table, I need to import the at-identity schema, and I also need to make the Application record a Complex Type for later use. Because the prefix for the namespace is tns, the Data Structure Type needs to be tns:Application
I then add the primary key field and set the Data Type to the at-identity
After saving it, I then go back to my Header schema and import both the at-identity and the application schema
I then add a new record as a sibling to Header, and I name the new record Application (the name of the table), I choose as the Data Structure Type ns0:Application (ComplexType) and set the Max Occurs as blank, as we will not be repeating until later
I complete the process for all of the other tables, except for the tables that do not have children, and there I don’t need to select the primary key field (as I will let SQLXML do that without me coding for that)
So I generate the schemas for everything and now we are getting to childless table importing,ProviderInfo for example, I don’t need to add the primary key, I simply need to include the foreign key when I generate the schema
Remember that all I have to do is define the Data Structure Type as tns:ProviderInfo
When I import the InsertProviderInfoService into the InsertHeaderService schema I choose ns2:ProviderInfo and again, since it is not repeating, you can simply leave the Max and Min Occurs blank
You continue this same pattern, adding primary keys if there are children to the table, omitting them if not.
The final output should look like this:
Delete all of the Orchestrations excepth the first one that has defined the Header and rename it to InsertClaimProcess and change the Typename to InsertClaimService also
Now for the mapping (finally). Create the map with the EDI input, and the header schema output. Since the Header, Application, and provider are all single instances, I hard code a, b, and c respectively into the updg:at-identity primary key and the foreign keys. For the ProviderInfo, ProviderLocation, and Subscriber, I link them all to ‘c’
Since Subscriber is the first repeatable child table, I add an index from the source to the d primary key and then distribute the concatonated foreign key thru the child tables
Finishing out the relationships look like this:
Now all I have to do is finish the mapping and I am complete, invoke the map in the orchestration and it is complete.
Hope that this was as fun to do as it was to discover!
