12/10/2012 3:22 PM ET

Tickets on sale now for a Night of Entertainment with Don Mattingly, hosted by George Lopez, January 24

Dodger manager Don Mattingly’s event at the Sports Museum of Los Angeles will benefit Mattingly Charities and the Dodgers Dream Foundation

LOS ANGELES – Dodger manager Don Mattingly’s “A Night of Entertainment with Don Mattingly hosted by George Lopez” is set for January 24, 6:30 to 10:00 p.m., at the Sports Museum of Los Angeles. This charitable event’s proceeds will benefit Mattingly Charities and the Dodgers Dream Foundation (DDF). Tickets are on sale now. Hosted by George Lopez, the night features entertainment by several comedians and a tour of the museum’s collection of Dodger artifacts dating to the franchise’s infancy in Brooklyn. The night concludes with a Q&A session with Mattingly. Dodgers scheduled to attend include Adrian Gonzalez, Matt Kemp and Clayton Kershaw.

“I’m really excited with the night that we’ve put together to assist both Mattingly Charities and the Dodgers Dream Foundation,” said Mattingly. “I hope all Dodger fans, sports fans and comedy fans will come together on January 24 for these great causes.”

Tickets to “A Night of Entertainment with Don Mattingly hosted by George Lopez” are $195 and include access to the cocktail reception, with hosted food and beverages, and silent auction (6:30 p.m.), opening remarks by George Lopez (8:00 p.m.), comedic performances (8:15 p.m.), Q&A with Mattingly (9:00 p.m.) and an autographed Mattingly photograph. Fans can visit http://www.dodgers.com/mattingly or call (323) 224-1413 for complete details and to purchase tickets. VIP sponsor packages are also available.

Silent auction items for “A Night of Entertainment with Don Mattingly hosted by George Lopez” include a Dodger game experience for two with Dodger owner Earvin “Magic” Johnson, a Yankees VIP game day experience at Yankee Stadium for four and items featuring Hall of Famers, unique sports experiences and items from some of country music’s biggest stars. A full listing of silent auction items can be found at http://www.dodgers.com/mattingly.

Mattingly Charities was created to serve disadvantaged youth by supporting programs which promote baseball and softball participation in conjunction with other developmentally related activities. Mattingly Charities will provide funding, services and equipment for baseball, softball and ultimately other sports, and related youth development activities, for the benefit of disadvantaged youth, youth leagues and social welfare and related organizations. All efforts of the organization will be focused on these activities. More information can be found by visiting http://www.mattinglycharities.org.

Founded in 1998, DDF was created to provide educational, athletic and recreational opportunities for the youth of the Greater Los Angeles community. The Foundation places special emphasis on helping traditionally under-served youth. The DDF Community Diamond is divided into four bases: youth sports and recreation, literacy and education, health and environment. More information can be found by visiting http://www.dodgers.com/DDF.

In the first part of this article, we talked about Load Balancing in general and took a closer look at what the advantages and disadvantages of simple layer 4 load balancing for Exchange 2013 were. Today we’ll dive a bit deeper into the remaining two ways of load balancing Exchange 2013: layer 4 with multiple namespaces and ‘traditional’ layer 7.

Layer 7 Load Balancing

Layer 7 load balancing offers some additional functionalities over Layer 4. Because traffic is being decrypted, the load balancer can now ‘read’ (‘understand’) the traffic that is coming through and take appropriate actions based on the type (or destination) of the traffic.

By decrypting traffic, the load balancer can read the destination for a packet which allows you to make a distinction between traffic for the different Exchange workloads while still using a single virtual service. Based on the type of workload, traffic could e.g. be sent to a different set or servers. However, this was not the most important reason to do Layer 7 load balancing. In Exchange 2010, traffic coming from a certain client had to be persisted to the same endpoint (= the same Client Access Server). This meant that the initial connection could be sent to just about any CAS, but once the session was made superseding packets for that session had to be maintained with the same CAS.

A Load Balancer typically has multiple ways to maintain this client <> server relationship. Depending on the model and make of your Load Balancer, you might see the vendor refer to this relationship as “persistence”, “stickyness” etc… The most commonly used methods are:

• Source IP
• Session ID
• Session Cookie
• …

For a load balancer to be able to identify these things it needs to be able to read the traffic, forcing the need for traffic to be decrypted except when using Source IP. Although Source IP affinity doesn’t necessarily require decryption, in some scenarios using this type of affinity could cause an uneven distribution of load; especially when traffic is coming from behind a NAT device. Consider the following scenario:

Multiple internet-connected devices connect to your on-premises environment and before hitting the load balancers, they go through a router/firewall or other NAT device which will ‘change’(mask) the source IP Addresses (80.70.60.50 and 80.70.60.40) with a single internal address (10.20.30.40). If your load balancers are configured to persist connections based on the source IP address, all connections will potentially end up at the same CAS. This is – of course – something you’d want to avoid. Else, what purpose would your load balancer have? Right?

For this “problem” there are a few solutions:

• You could disable NAT, which would reveal the client’s original IP address to the load balancer. Unfortunately, this isn’t always possible and depends on your network topology/routing infrastructure.
• You could change the configuration of your load balancer to use something else than the Source IP to determine whether a connection should be persisted or not.

In the latter case persistence based on the SSL Session ID is a good alternative. The load balancer will examine every “packet” that flows through it, read the session ID and if it finds a match for a previously created session, it will send that packet to the same destination as before. While this works brilliantly, it will induce a higher load on your load balancer because:

1. the load balancer needs to inspect each packet flowing through, consuming more CPU cycles
2. the load balancer needs to maintain a bigger “routing table”, which consumes more memory. By that I mean a table where the Session ID is mapped to a destination server.

As mentioned earlier, because you are decrypting the traffic, you can e.g. determine from the packet what the destination URL is. In essence, this allows you to define multiple virtual services (one for each workload) and make the load balancer choose what virtual service to forward a packet to. In this specific example, the virtual services are “hidden” for the end user.

Let’s poor that into an image, things might become more clearly that way:

For external clients, there is still a single external URL (VIP) they connect to but ‘internally’  there is separate virtual service for each workload. Whenever a packet reaches the load balancer, it will be read and based on the destination URL, the appropriate virtual service is picked. The biggest advantage is that each virtual service can have its own set of health criteria. This also means that – because workloads are split – if e.g. OWA fails on one server, it won’t affect other workloads for that server (as they belong to a different virtual service). While OWA might be down, other protocols remain healthy and the LB will continue forwarding packets to that server for a specific workload.

With this in mind, we can safely conclude that Layer 7 Load Balancing clearly offers some benefits over simple layer 4. However it will cost you more in terms of hardware capacity for your load balancer. Given that a decently sized load balancer can cost a small fortune, it’s always nice to explore what other alternatives you have. On top of that, this kind of configuration isn’t really “easy” and requires a lot of work from a load balancer’s perspective. I’ll keep the configuration steps for a future article.

Layer 4 load balancing with multiple namespaces

As I showed in the first part of this article, Exchange 2013 greatly simplifies load balancing, compared to Exchange 2010. Unfortunately, this simplification comes at a cost. You loose the ability to do a per-protocol health check when using layer 4. And let’s face it: losing functionality isn’t something you like, right?

Luckily, there is a way to have the best of both worlds though…

Combining the simplicity of Layer 4 and finding a way to mimic the Layer 7 functionality is what the fuzz is all about. Because when using Layer 4 your load balancer has no clue what the endpoint for a given a connection is, we need to find a way to make the Load Balancer know what the endpoint is, without actually needing to decrypt traffic.

The answer is in fact as simple as the idea itself: use a different virtual service for each workload but this time with a different IP address for each URL. The result would be something like this:

Each workload now has its own virtual service and therefore you also get a per-workload (per-protocol) availability. This means that, just as with Layer 7, the failure of a single workload on a server has no immediate impact on other workloads while at the same time, you maintain the same level of simplicity as with simple Layer 4. Sounds cool, right?!

Obviously, there is a “huge” downside to this story: you potentially end up with a bunch of different external IP addresses. Although there are also solutions for that, it’s beyond the scope of this article to cover those.

Most people – when I tell them about this approach – don’t like the idea of exposing multiple IPs/URLs to an end user. Personally, I don’t see this as an issue though. “For my users it’s already hard enough to remember a single URL”, they say. Who am I to argue? However, when thinking about it; there’s only one URL an end user will actually be exposed to and that’s the one for OWA. All other URLs are configured automatically using Autodiscover. So even with these multiple URLs/IPs, your users really only need to remember one.

Of course, there’s also the element of the certificate, but depending on the load balancer you buy, that could still be cheaper than the L7 load balancer from the previous example.

Configuring Layer 4 load balancing with different namespaces is done the same way as you configure a single namespace. Only now you have to do it multiple times. The difference will be in the health checks you perform for each protocol and those are something that’s free for you to choose. For now, the health-check options are relatively limited (although that also depends from the load balancer you use). But the future might hold some interesting changes: at MEC, Greg Taylor explained that Microsoft is working with some load balancer vendors to make their load balancers capable of “reading” the health status of an Exchange produced by Managed Availability. This would mean that your load balancer no longer has to perform any specific health checks itself and can rely on the built-in mechanisms in Exchange. Unfortunately there isn’t much more information available right now, but rest assured I follow this closely.

Differentiator: health checks

As said before, the configuration to Layer 4 without multiple namespaces is identical. For more information on how to configure a virtual service with a KEMP load balancer, please take a look at the first part of this article.

The key difference lies within the difference in health checks you perform against each workload. Even then, there is a (huge) difference in what load balancers can do.

Even though I like KEMP load balancers a lot, they are – compared to e.g. F5 – limited in their health checks. From a KEMP load balancer perspective, your health check rule for e.g. Outlook Anywhere would look something like this:

From an F5 perspective, a BIG-IP LTM would allow you to “dive deeper” into the health checks You can define a user account that is used to authenticate against the rpcproxy.dll. Only if that fails, the service will be marked down, rather then using a “simple” HTTP GET.

On a side note: for about 90% of the deployments out there, the simple health check method proves more than enough…

Conclusion

Below you’ll find a table in which I summarized the most important pro’s and con’s per option.

If it were op to me, I like the idea of Layer 4 with multiple namespaces. It’s clean, it’s simple to setup (both from a load balancer and Exchange point of view) and it will most probably save me some money. Unless you only have a limited amount of (external) IP addresses available, this seems like the way forward to me.

Nonetheless, this doesn’t mean you should kick out your fancy load balancer if you already have one. My opinion: use with what you got and above all: keep it simple!

According to a release from the Sheriff’s Office, a third party to the shooting reported that Brittany Markham, 21, of Kemp, was trying to keep James Alan Nix, 41, from injuring himself when the gun went off, hitting Markham.

As the third party ran from the house toward the street to get help, a second shot was heard.

Police arrived at the residence – in the 18000 block of FM 2613 – and found the suspect and victim just inside the front door deceased from gunshot wounds.

Kaufman County officers are still investigating the case.

Also Check Out:

• Larry Hagman Dead At The Age Of 81
• Hurst Officer Outburst Caught On Video
• Dallas Man Attacked By Pack Of Pit Bulls
• CBS 11 Investigates: How Dirty Is Your Plane?
• Military Veterans Killed In Midland Train Wreck

Additionally, he also stated that these features will be coming under the name “Edge Security Gateway” (ESG) and released early in 2013 as a “zero-cost enhancement to the core LoadMaster product family”. It also looks like that these features will be added to all LoadMaster models; physical and virtual because internet-facing deployments pose the same security challenges to small guys and big guys alike, according to KEMP.

It isn’t the first time that KEMP pulls of such a ‘stunt’, a few years back they also added features as HTTP Caching, Compression and IPS at no additional cost.

The reason that I’m actively blogging about this is two-folded. For one, as a KEMP user I like the value their devices offer. Sure, big players like F5 and Citrix have their added-value, but from a cost/benefit perspective it’s hard to surpass KEMP, in my humble opinion. Secondly, I like the way KEMP runs it business. Of course profit will be one of the biggest drives, but I also noticed that KEMP tends to listen to it’s customers and evenly important: the Exchange community.

I remember that, back at MEC, fellow UC Architect Serkan Varoglu and I were changing thoughts with two of the KEMP guys on this subject. We literally came to the conclusion that it would be nice to see KEMP “filling the gap” that TMG would leave behind. Knowing that our input, as well as the input of many others within the community is taken seriously and is also acted upon can only be applauded.

On Monday, KEMP will be making an official announcement so make sure to keep an eye on their twitter feed and website! I have signed up for testing these new features during the BETA. So expect to see some additional information when it becomes available!

Until later!

Michael

Note   I wasn’t asked to write this article and I am doing this by my own choice. I haven’t been given nor been promised anything in return by KEMP or anyone else. These thoughts and opinions are purely my own.

• End Point Authentication for Pre-Auth
• Persistent Logging and Reporting for a new User Log
• LDAP and Kerberos communication from the LoadMaster to the Active Directory
• NTLM and Basic authentication communication from a Client to the LoadMaster
• RADIUS communication from LoadMaster to a RADIUS server
• Single Sign On across Virtual Services

Knowing that as from the 1st of December, you cannot buy TMG (or licenses) anymore, I can imagine that this news is welcomed with open arms within the Exchange community.

I’ve already let KEMP know that I’d be interested in participating in a beta-program (if one exists) and will report back once more information becomes available. Ray Downes (KEMP) mentioned the following on Twitter yesterday: “Working on a detailed description which will be published on the website later this week.” So I expect more info to become available soon.

For more information, have a look at Tony’s article here:
http://thoughtsofanidlemind.wordpress.com/2012/11/26/kemp-loadmaster-tmg/

A hat in the making, using Jean Muddle’s Wensleydale yarn, photo by Tom van Deijnen

This amount is very attractive to many home buyers in today’s market.  Provided the home you choose is FHA financing eligible, which many to most are, then you can move right into choosing a home that fits your needs and stays within the budget you and your lender/broker have determined would best fit your needs.

During your home search you should be working with your lender and doing the necessary paperwork to insure that you meet all the requirements and that you are not caught by any surprises in the week(s) prior to closing.  Have ready for your Broker/Lender such items as bank statements and pay stubs as well as pay off amount and payoff date on any obligations you currently have.  Much of this will be verified via your full credit report but this allows you to be best prepared to fill out any paperwork and answer any questions the lender may have for you.

Going the FHA route will allow you to take advantage of low down payments, excellent rates, and terms you can live with while you enjoy the rewards of home ownership.

Happy House Hunting in North Texas. If you need a REALTOR® to list your current home, or are looking to buy or rent in the North Texas region- Give Dawn a call/text 214-604-4561 at Avery Properties/Avery Realty Group- where Sellers Enjoy 4% Listings and Buyers Enjoy Cash Back!! (ask me how…..)

.

What if Romney’s surge reflects more than pleasant surprise at the candidate’s personality and routine dissatisfaction with Obama? Photo: AP

.

By Matthew d’Ancona
The Telegraph

At the Bicom annual dinner last Tuesday, I had the privilege to meet and then hear Ehud Barak, a true Israeli hero, speak about the challenges and opportunities facing his nation. Now defence minister, and a former prime minister, Barak is too authentically military in his bones to rattle sabres. He told the gathering organised by Bicom – the marvellous organisation which fosters links between Britain and Israel – that his country did not seek confrontation with Iran over its nuclear ambitions. But, with a silken clarity far more powerful than growled menace, he made clear that Israel will do what it has to do if those ambitions are not verifiably curtailed.

Since the proposed super sewer was announced members of the local community have campaigned to save the park, coming together to form Save KEMP.  The KEMPers are a diverse group of people who are passionate about keeping this oasis of green space open for public use.  I feel really lucky to have met them all, a rich mix of locals who keep the community spirit alive in this large and often lonely city called London.  Through them I have met elderly residents who played all their childhood in KEMP back when it had paddling pools and the river still had working docks.  They are happy to share their stories of the East End they know, quite a different place to where I now bring my children up.  Each of them has made me feel welcome and shown me that there is still a strong community here that is willing to fight for what is right.

Tonight is Halloween, we spent the evening in KEMP where the local council provided a pirate themed party for the younger children of the borough.  They had a trapeze act, face painting, a bouncy castle, a pirate school and pirate bling making all free of charge for the kids.  We loved it, there was nobody selling anything, the event was not commercial, it was purely there for the children’s enjoyment.  As a mum who does not have a large excess of money I felt under no pressure to spend spend spend, only to enjoy the company of the people I was with.

It saddens me to think Thames Water’s plans would halt events like this but knowing the locals like I now do I imagine when/if this happens London’s news will feature quite a colourful group of people willing to participate in direct action against the proposed destruction of our park.

]]> http://them0vieblog.com/2012/10/29/non-review-review-the-invisible-man-1933/ Mon, 29 Oct 2012 18:00:52 +0000 Darren http://them0vieblog.com/2012/10/29/non-review-review-the-invisible-man-1933/ http://01964.net/2012/10/27/kemp-developments-of-hornsea-scoops-award/ Sat, 27 Oct 2012 06:40:15 +0000 01482net http://01964.net/2012/10/27/kemp-developments-of-hornsea-scoops-award/ Kemp Developments scoops prestigious award: The “Master builder of the year Awards” is now in its 10th year and the this year’s competition saw Kemp Developments being named as the 2010 regional winner for the Yorkshire and Trent area taking the award for “Medium renovation projects” – for contracts valued between £50,000 to £250,000. Entry into the competition can only be gained by a nomination from a satisfied client; in this case Mr & Mrs Leafe from Bainton, East Yorkshire. Pictured here with Mr & Mrs Leafe are Garry Kemp and Kemp Developments’ Contracts Manager Andrew Gillett celebrating their success at the Master Builder Awards Ceremony at the Park Plaza Hotel in London.

The awards were presented by Phil Spencer from Channel 4’s
“Location, Location, Location” television programme, who addressing the room described the contractors present as “the cream of the UK construction industry”.

Website:
http://www.kempdevelopments.co.uk

Posted using Tinydesk Writer iPhone app

The awards were presented by Phil Spencer from Channel 4’s
“Location, Location, Location” television programme, who addressing the room described the contractors present as “the cream of the UK construction industry”.

Website:
http://www.kempdevelopments.co.uk

Je to tu definitivně poslední ohlédnutí za naším Eurotripem a to ohlednutí myslím doslovně. Video je zde:

Díky za vaše pravidelné čtení našich cestovatelských zážitků. Jste Epesní

+Mé další počiny z let minulých na mém Vimeo.

+Celá sekce EUROTRIP k přečtení ZDE

Sarah si klepe na čelo. Proč Berlín? Jste sem jeli snad celý den ne? Tak pro přesnost jen 8,5 hodiny vlakem. FUJ!
Proč Berlín? Chceme vidět lidi, co chodí oblečení tak 10x extravagantněji než my, což by v česku nepřekousl snad ani ten největší liberál. Jo a Sarah je italka, která nám v úžasném bytě poskytuje azyl. Je tak milá, až je nám to trapný. Na její doporučení míříme místo snídaně na “brunch”. Snídaňo-oběd je tak výborný a obrovský, že Mařence svítí očka jak šestiletému decku u vánočního stromečku. Úlet. Hlavní památky míjíme bez většího zájmu. Za braniborskou bránou však sledujeme, jak původem 100% čeští cigoši obírají dvě francouzsky o 100€ na skořápkách. V Berlíně nám nejde ani tak o město, jako o atmosféru. Sledujeme lidi, to jak v různých částech města odlišně plyne čas a navštěvujeme proslavné hipster obchůdky, kterých je nespočet. Večere a noční procházka po street artu se Sarah byla magická. Další ráno, další brunch a pak už jen žlutý autobus, vůně řízků a dotazy: “pane stevarde Lukáši, mužeme si ty sluchátka nechat?” Domu, do Prahy, do lékárny, doprdele ….. KONEC

This slideshow requires JavaScript.