Smart Thinking Newsletter

Message from Wade

Well, here we are at the end of another month, and you may have noticed that there was no newsletter last month. You maybe asking yourself what happened in April that we missed the newsletter for the first time in over 2 years? Well, it turns out that I thought that I would change things up and try to change the content around and get it done myself, guess what – it didn’t happen. All month I have had a reminder in my phone to get it done, and now today I realized I don’t have anything done for May.

So, time to realize the flaw – ME.  I reached out to my fantastic writer Angela and now the newsletter is setup and ready to go.  Let that be a lesson learned, do what you do well and let others do what they do well. Don’t let yourself get in your way when you know you need to get things done.

Enjoy the read and if your in the way of your organization getting the hosting and maintenance services they need maybe its time to get out of the way and Get Panda Help!

Making a difference one tree at a time

This spring has found The Panda out and about doing all sorts of things.  Several events happened with Big Brothers Big Sisters and The St Thomas Railway City Rotary Club of the past 60 days that has helped make a difference in our community.  It is absolutely amazing knowing that the little things we are doing is making a small difference.

April started with the end of the Inn-Out-of-the-Cold program for 2015.2016, our Rotary Club served up a ton of meals and a ton of dishes were washed (and rewashed).

Next we were up in Sarnia at Rotary Training for our Rotary District.  The Panda is really looking forward to being President of our Club in 2017-2018.  We will be putting a huge focus on kids and will hopefully be able to get a new Interact Club up and running , sending out our first exchange student and hopefully receiving our first exchange student from abroad. The training really gets you thinking about how to the message out to the local and international community. Rotary really helps bring the message the “Rotary is here, something good is going to happen.”

Big Brothers Big Sisters of St Thomas Elgin was out serving up hotdogs and sausages at Canadales (an amazing place to get your green thumb – green!).  We served up a ton of great food and made some money to help support all the great programs that help mentor great kids right here in our community. Rotary will be out in July to do the same BBQ! Later this summer Big Brothers Big Sisters will be holding their annual golf tournament and the 2nd Annual Big Ball Drop.  The Smart Panda is honoured to be the title sponsor for these events, and The Panda Team is looking forward to getting the golf clubs out to test our skills on the links! If you are in the area and want to golf – register here! If you would like to find out more about the big ball drop – click here! Interestingly enough myFM which is the local radio station is a title sponsor for Big Brothers Big Sisters and we had to record the commercials for the Golf & Ball Drop, and it turns out that The Panda has a radio voice – who knew.  Maybe that means some podcasts will be in our future.

May started off with Rotary serving up a huge all you could eat Perch dinner to over 300 people.  The Club was able to raise almost $5,000 which will be used to support many great local programs in the upcoming year. Speaking of great programs, earlier this year we had Kettle Creek Conservation Authority come in and speak to The Club and we were able to use $500.00 most of which was given to use from the Rotary Club of London West when they closed last year and we combined that with a 50% matching district grant of $250.00 allowing us to give $750.00 to purchase trees which we planted in a local park right here in St Thomas (actually the park around the corner from The Panda Headquarters). Sixty beautiful trees were planted in the park all of which go towards the count of the Million Tree Challenge.  It was a nice way to segway into The Club’s second birthday last week.

June will find us out getting ready for The Ride to End MS where we will bike 100 miles from Grand Bend to London (and back). We are looking to try to exceed $1000.00 this year, you can donate here!

Until Next Month……

Application Server Load Balancing & Failover

PeopleTools has come a long way in regards to load balancing and failover.  I honestly don’t know when they brought in these features, however, in 8.54 and above these failover and load balancing work and based on the testing I have done they work correctly.  There are different options you can specify in the configuration.properties file to load balance requests and also for failover in case a domain is down.

Configuring Weighted Load Balancing

With weighted load balancing, you can set the “weight” of the load, or amount of requests, being directed to a particular server. Weight values are integers 1–10, with 1 being low and 10 being a heavy load. Servers that can handle extra work can take heavy loads, while servers that are either less powerful or are being used in other capacities can take lower loads. You specify weighted load balancing by modifying the server values in the psserver property in the PeopleSoft Internet Architecture configuration.properties file, using the following format.

psserver=HostServer1:Port1#Weight,HostServer2:Port2#Weight

Example: psserver=appserver1:9000#3,appserver2:9010#1 – In this case, appserver1 would receive 3x more requests than appserver2.

You an also specify strict failover assignments with weighted load balancing, with the following options:

Configuring Failover

You can configure with strict failover with weighted backup or strict failover with sequential backup. This is done by adding the failover servers in curly brackets at the end of the server entry:

psserver=<host>:<port>#wt{failover servers}

Example: With the failover string, you can set weighted backup by separating failover server with a comma (,).

psserver=Host1:Port1#Wt{Host3:Port3#Wt,Host4:Port4#Wt},Host2:Port2#Wt – In this case, Host 3 and Host 4 are failover servers when Host 1 is down.

Example: To set sequential backup, you separate multiple backup servers using a semicolon (;).

psserver=Host1:Port1#Wt{Host3:Port3;Host4:Port4},Host2:Port2#Wt – In this case, the system assigns Host 4 the requests when both Hosts 1 and 3 are down.

Windows Security – User Groups

So have you working in a windows environment and found yourself not able to access a specific directory because of windows security? Well I find many times when working on systems at clients that they have done some odd security things to their directory structures.  So the question becomes what groups does my user profile have access to so that I can determine what level of access I have to the directory(s) in question.

From the command line use this command:

gpresult /r

This will generate a extensive list of information but at the end it will show the “User Settings”

Sometimes it is nice to just have a quick reference to the Record Types from the Record Definitions, as here is a quick reference SQL code:

SELECT R.RECNAME AS RECORD_NAME,
( CASE
WHEN R.RECTYPE = 0 THEN ‘Table’
WHEN R.RECTYPE = 1 THEN ‘View’
WHEN R.RECTYPE = 2 THEN ‘Derived’
WHEN R.RECTYPE = 3 THEN ‘Sub Record’
WHEN R.RECTYPE = 5 THEN ‘Dynamic View’
WHEN R.RECTYPE = 6 THEN ‘Query View’
WHEN R.RECTYPE = 7 THEN ‘Temporary Table’
ELSE ‘Unknown’
END )   AS RECORD_TYPE
FROM   PSRECDEFN R