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This is slightly off topic of programming but still has to do with my programming project. I'm writing an app that uses a custom proxy server. I would like to write the server in C# since it would be easier to write and maintain, but I am concerned about the licensing cost of Windows Server + CALS vs a Linux server (obviously, no CALS). There could potentially be many client sites with their own server and 200-500 users at each site.
The proxy will work similar to a content filter. Take returning web pages, process based on the content, and either return the webpage, or redirect to a page on another webserver. There will not be any use of SQL server, user authentication, etc.
Will I need Cals for this? If so, about how much would it cost to setup a Windows Server with proper licensing (per server, in USA)?
This really is an OT question. In any case, there is nothing easier than contacting your local MS distributor. As stackoverflow is by nature an international site, asking a question like that, where the answer is most likely to vary by location (MS license prices really are highly variable and country-specific) is in my opinion not likely to receive an useful answer.
I realize this isn't exactly answering your question but if you want to use Linux, maybe you want to look into using Mono. .Net on Linux.
If users will not be actually connecting to any MS server apps (such as Exchange, SQL Server, etc) and won't be using any OS features directly (i.e. connecting to UNC paths) then all that should be required is the server license for the machine to run the OS. You need Windows Server CALs when clients connect to shares, Exchange CALs for mail clients, and SQL Server CALs for apps that connect to your databases. If the clients of your server won't be connecting to anything but the ports offered by your service, you should be in the clear, and it shouldn't cost any more to build a server for 100 users than 10.
You may not need any CALs for users depending on how you use the server. Certain functionality requires the purchase of CALs but some doesn't. There's no real good way to answer this question since the requirements are too vague. Does it use domain services? Does it use SQL server? Clustering? There are many variables.
If you are looking at what the most you could possibly pay, go to CDW and look at the Open License/Open Business products to get an estimate.
Like said above, if you are using your own connections and nothing else on the server you wont need the cals.
I would Google the ROI on Linux vs Windows for a commercial server, I have no option generally on this, but I have seen that long term they level out, in the grand scheme of things the initial cost of the Windows license is actually minimal and insignificant.
Choose the best technology to solve the end users problem, document why, provide an evaluation report, include maintenance costs, development costs etc. When you do this the answer will be clear to you and your customer.
If your users are not connecting to any other windows resources (Active Directory, SQL Server, File Shares, etc) then you shouldn't need CALs but you I believe there is something like an external connector license. There's also a 'web edition' which looks like it's in the range of ~$400.
Also it looks like Microsoft will be removing the CAL restrictions on web servers completely in Windows Server 2008
Microsoft should call their licensing division Enigma...
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How come that The response time is very different when calling the same action/page in different times of day ? I'm working in an internal server where I'm the only one who uses the application (which doesn't work with internet connection)
I'm not connected to a network, and there is only one user who is running the app (which is me). It's a ASP site with a remote database
Once again, where are you going to start? You're seriously going to need to look at all aspects of the server that the application is on.
If you have a connected database then you'll need to look at whether:
the database is on a remote server - network issues can interfere quite heavily with your timings here.
the same server - if this is an instanced database you will need to take into account the performance impact of the service that is managing your database and all of the related aspects of that (e.g. do you have any kind of agents running background tasks for the database?).
Are you running a standalone database like Ms Access? - this may cause the least disruption in some ways but can be disastrous in others.
What type of web-application are you looking at?
A simple scripted non-managed IIS ASP site - Very little to manage via IIS here; no need to section off a pool for the application.
A full blown IIS managed application - IIS managed, passing of cookies, credentials etc (all takes slices of time).
If you are connected to a network, then...
How many users are on the network - Though every machine on the network may have a negligible impact on your application server or PC, there are definitely some that do, such as DNC servers and what have you; they need to gather network information for the successful management and running of the network as a whole. Your application server will also communicate with other servers to say things like: "Hi! I'm over here!".
Perhaps the most important question should be regarding your server(s):
What services are running - every service that runs on your server swallows time slices.
What services are not running on your server? - to keep your timings realistic should you stop any services or (more importantly) not?
What services are running on your database server? - just as important as your main application server, your database server needs time to furnish data to your application. If there are other services running on here then this can impact heavily on your time.
Please everyone, chip in here - there's just so much to take into account.
By not giving an adequate qualification for your task it's very difficult for anyone to give a wholly valid answer.
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We are planning to introduce real time chat feature in our mobile apps. Ofcourse we would be going the XMPP way.
Can anybody shed some light on stats for maximum number of concurrent users Openfire has supported on EC2 instances (windows server) of different sizes in the real world?
We are looking at numbers ranging from 22500 concurrent users to 75000 concurrent users depending upon growth patterns predicted for app downloads and user adaptability for this new real time chat feature. time range = next 12 months.
From whatever googling I have done so far, it seems Openfire may not be the best bet when it comes to scaling out so can these numbers be supported on a single instance of ec2 over time? ie: we start hosting on smaller instances and keep increasing instance size as load demands.
Ejabbered seemed to be the best option when it comes to scaling out but since we would need to have erlang skills in order to extend it makes ejabbered a difficult choice for us. The other alternate is tigase which is java so we could extend it much easily but if Openfire can work for us for the next 12 months or so by scaling up versus scaling out, we would be happy to use it for now and see how well this new chat feature is embraced. Number one reason being ease of management.
Lastly, if you could help with links on SaaS / PaaS providers for XMPP chat + Push Notifications to mobile devices when user is offline, it would be awesome. We got in touch with quickblox.com but their enterprise offerings appear to be expensive for us at the moment. We want 100% ownership and portability of our data if we go the SaaS / PaaS way.
There are several references to Openfire handling those and larger numbers of concurrent users on a single server.
There is document on scalability from 2007 that shows 50000 users supported on version 3.2. The current release is 3.7.1. Don't forget that that also means a much slower machine than anything you are likely to run on today.
You also have to take into account what features of XMPP you will be using, but simple messaging should be able to easily handle the numbers you are referring to.
The numbers you mention should be easily handled by ejabberd.
I am unsure as to how you want to "extend" ejabberd. Multi-user chat and messaging are handled fine by all servers and of course ejabberd. Additionally, if you are thinking of custom protocols, these can be written in your language of choice and connect to ejabberd as an XMPP component.
The only thing you might miss is a web interface (which ejabberd has but it's rather limited), but then again if you expect to manage things through a web UI for an application, you will need to think again ;)
if you want to go with ejabberd, you can always get support from ProcessOne.
This is another plus for ejabberd, as it can be commercially supported if you want to / can afford.
Android Push Notification is a good solution.
With Android-Push services, you (Android developers) can send messages directly to the people who have installed your app. All you need is to include a code snippet into your app, and post to a specific URL to reach your app users, even if your app is inactive on their phone.
Feature:
Free
Free, unless you need extensive number of pushes for your app. Of course you can pay for more push and a quicker tech support.
Easy
Extremely easy to integrate into your app
Super simple to push to the app: just send a URL request
No C2DM limit, you don't have to have a gmail account to use the push service
Cloud service, no need to setup your own push server
Effective
Low battery and network consumption on the phone
Track user interaction, find out how users react to your push
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I contribute to a cluster of C++ and C# servers that publish data statistics, connection status, and management commands for use by a management client. The current implementation uses custom middleware.
Code for both the servers and the client can be changed. I am considering migration to some standard management solution to simplify the code and improve stability. The potential to use 3rd party tools would also be a plus.
What technology should I use for the management interface ... WMI? It seems to be the default, but I don't see a lot of current books or articles. Or should I expose some common web service? Or?
I would say that the answers really depends on the scope of you project.
If you target a Microsoft Windows only client server platform, you can plan to instrument your server code and build a WMI provider. WMI comes from a standard (WBEM) but it's for Microsoft usage only. However using WMI, you keep the ability to use open source management tools like Nagios. And on your client machine your server state stay queryable from PowerShell or VBScript.
If you target a mixt Windows Linux client server platform, I think that SNMP (yes this old stuff) still stay in the race, you can plan to instrument your server code and build an SNMP proxy server. This is not so hard on Windows box. This solution open a wide amount of client management tools on any platform.
I would use a web service only if the scope is private use, you develop the management client for your servers tools, but as far as I know Web service is not so standard as far as management is concern.
A web service interface would be how I'd do it. This really decouples server from the client and allows you the ability to use many different types of applications on the client-side to communicate with the server. Utilizing WMI within the services would also be part of going this route. WMI is a bit confusing at first, but offers the greatest amount of flexibility. There are also several libraries that can be used to abstract your code from the nitty-gritty of WMI and see it as a control layer.
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I work for a medium sized software company and have been put to the task of finding a new way of electronically distributing our software. We don't have a super fast connection to distribute it ourselves so it would need to be a solution that we can upload to and send out links to customers. The customers won't be purchasing our software from our website as we already do most of our sales from direct sales and partner sales. Since I joined the company we have grown from CD distribution sized downloads to DVD sized distribution downloads. We released a new version and find the YouSendIT Service to be clunky and 99% of our customers receive a link to download the software. We only send out a printed media if requested. Is there a service besides yousendit that allows for unlimited file size uploads/downloads. I have heard of drop.io and it seemed to be similar to yousendit. If you could please point me in the direction of Electronic software distribution system that is 3rd party hosted would be appreciated.
Thanks
Mike
You should look into Content Delivery Networks, such as Amazon CloudFront.
You might want to reconsider the way you are going about this.
If you software is open source, you should be using sourceforge. Otherwise you should just get a cheap hosting plan with lots of transfer bandwidth.
For example, godaddy has an unlimited account (unlimited transfer, unlimited space) for about $14.95 per month.
You point a sub domain i.e. download.rivageek.com to that server. This gives your users confidence when they download your application.
If they have to go to some ad laden 3rd party site they might think twice about giving you money. If you lose only 1 customer to that, it pays for itself (assuming you charge more than 14.95 for your product).
The fine print on many of those 3rd party sites mean they own whatever you upload as well.
If you'd like something that allows (simplisticly) secure one-time downloads, I've used filehosting.org in the past. They give you a hashed link to the software when you upload it, which you can then email to anybody you want to be able to download the file. If you want, you can set it to delete the file after one download.
In response to using your own domain for the downloads, it's possible to configure both Amazon S3 and CloudFront to use a custom domain name. Here are the instructions for S3 -- very straight forward:
http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonS3/latest/index.html?VirtualHosting.html
If emailing out a direct link to your distribution file (zip, etc.) is sufficient, I'd say go with one of these services -- they're very cost effective, reliable, and easy to set up.
You could use a filehosting service or get a regular web host with unlimited bandwidth just avoid Godaddy as its shared hosting is overcrowded and overbooked. (personal experience)
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I was brainstorming interesting usages of Twitter and came up with the following:
An application can use it as a call home mechanism
An application that has an invalid license could broadcast its location
A software company could use it as a remote shell like interface and issue commands to shutdown, restart and to publish patches
An application can use it for heartbeat purposes
Has anyone else came up with other non-standard usages of Twitter?
I fail to see the advantage of using a proprietary, third-party chat site in place of an appropriate networking protocol.
Matthew nailed the point that all these "applications" just represent a communications protocol between twitterer and remote host, and there are lots of mature protocols you could use instead right out of the box, rather than rolling your own on twitter.
But depending on your situation, of course there could be scenarios in which twitter is the easy way. I have written similar hacks that use e-mail as transport mechanism for automated tasks, simply because corporate red tape doesn't permit us other more conventional means. They can reboot machines, restart processes, post public messages, etc.
One of it is already available for Windows - "TweetMyPC v2.0 lets you shutdown/restart/LogOff and lots more in your windows PC.remotely."
I'm not sure this counts as a very practical use (a bit of fun mainly), but it certainly attracted my interest:
Twitter image encoding challenge
The idea of this challenge is to try to encode a picture into a 140 (Unicode) character Tweet. It's quite astounding how much information some of the algorithms posted there can fit into a message.
Scott Hanselman used Twitter to create an app for ordering a sandwich.
Check out his post
I think the main advantage of using twitter in instances like this is its SMS capabilities (and the fact they're free - whereas you can buy services that charge a monthly fee to allow you to receive SMS messages to a HTTP page or something like that).
I'd considered using it to make a little budget app for myself where I could SMS twitter things I'd bought to a private twitter account, similar for tracking petrol usage I was planning on smsing the odometer reading,cost etc in a certain format and capturing it at home to run statistics and stuff on it. There are limitations to it though - like you can only hook up an SMS number to 1 twitter account...
It's good to think outside the box, but don't be too focused on using just twitter because it's cool.
If you were comfortable setting up sensors and such, you could get a microcontroller, hook it up to a twitter feed, and then give it remote commands.
For instance, remote controlled house lights. You could then just tweet "Home lights on GXSDFXV" (The garbage at the end is to prevent real tweets from turning on and off your lights).
I wouldn't use Twitter in particular for transferring any private information (think about security if someone hacks the account and can shutdown your corporate servers or transfer fake licenses). For that I would setup a private server which implements the open microblogging protocol (like identi.ca) as long as - like others already said - there is another more suitable protocol.
For publishing PUBLIC information (heartbeat messages can be considered that, too) I like the idea pretty much. We recently had a very successfull (but unfortunately effectless) E-Petition in Germany where a Twitter account posted the number of signatures every couple of minutes.
Carsonified are using this to allow people to discover other people sitting in the same room at their conferences.
They label each chair with a tag and then you tweet that tag to an account they have and it registers you on a floorplan on the venue. Users are coloured in on the plan by their interests.
Clever but a bit overcomplicated for my tastes...
http://hello.carsonified.com/Home/Faq