I know this may not be an ideal stackoverflow question but I'm not sure where else to ask. To cut a long story short, I've built a web app running on a LAN network. The reason for this is that it is located somewhere there is very limited internet access. But there is one part of the app that needs to connect to the outside internet with Twilio.
So basically my question is, how do I get the script to keep trying to send the text message even if the user exits the session? Would some kind of cron job work or would I better off using asp.net or node.js? Or could a cgi script do it? Sorry if this is a silly question, I'm not overly familiar with how servers and all that actually work.
Thanks guys, let me know if anything needs clarifying
You can use fire and forget approach; however, it is not recommended.
Task.Run(() => StartLongRunningProcess());
Instead, you might want to consider using Background Tasks such as hangfire.
How to run Background Tasks in ASP.NET
Related
I want to use the forge viewer as a preview tool in my web app for generated data.
The problem I have is that the model derivative API is sometimes slow sometimes fast.
I read that this happens because the files are placed in a queue and being processed subsequentially.
In my opinion, this can be solved by:
Having the extraction.update webhook also tell me where I am in the queue. So I can inform my users with better progress information. Or when the queue is too long I can not stop the process.
Being able to have a private queue. I have no problem paying more credits if necessary.
Being able to generate svf2 files on my own server.
But I don't know if any of these options are possible. Or if there is another workaround.
Yes, that could be useful. I logged that request in our system: DERI-7940
Might be considered later on, but no plans currently
I'm not aware of any plans for that
We're always working on making the translation service better, but unfortunately, I cannot tell when it will meet your requirements - including the implementation of the webhook feature you mentioned.
SVF2 is specifically for very large models - is that what you are working with? If not, then I'm quite certain that translating to SVF would be faster.
I'm looking to create a webpage that will reflect the status of one of my company's servers automatically. Frequently there will be a minor error that only lasts 2-3 minutes, and it would be great to have this reflected on a self-generated page, which might prevent 50-60 unhappy clients from calling in simultaneously and asking what's wrong.
I'm not quite sure where to begin - would anyone have a suggestions for good resources to study? Programming examples? I'm not referring to the basics of writing an ASP.NET page, of course, but rather process interaction in Windows.
Thanks.
To pull this off, you'd need a separate page that essentially runs server diagnostics, otherwise the page wouldn't know if it was up or down. Also, the page would need to be isolated from the sort of problems that are kill other people's requests, such as cache hit problems, memory starvation, high CPU usage, insufficient bandwidth. So ideally the diagnostics would run in a separate app-pool, separate virtual directory, separate machine.
Many of the interesting diagnostics would require a WMI call, but some you can get from the My.Computer namespace.
Also, are you going to do this on every server, or do you want one web server to display the status of several different servers?
It also depends on the type of errors your servers are encountering.
If they are going down completely, or are losing internet connection, then pinging them after an interval of time will let you know if they are up or not.
If you have a specific process running on a server that becomes unavailable, that can be a little more tricky.
Your best bet is to find a way to do a simple request from the services/applications that are important and see if you get a response, if you do, the server is likely up, if not, then it is likely not.
Anything you can do to reduce the number of support calls you get is a good idea, but I'd also focus some time and try to figure out why your servers are going down so often.
Also, telling your users that the server is down, but not giving a reason why may not give the effect you are looking for. Users will still be confused and frustrated when they can't get their work done.
I know you were looking to build a webpage to display the server diagnostics, but there are plenty of server monitoring tools that produce webpages for an easy dashboard view of the history.
A quick google returned the following link:
http://www.webdesignbooth.com/10-really-useful-server-monitoring-tools/
I know that similar questions have been asked all over the place, but I'm having trouble finding one that relates directly to what I'm after.
I have a website where a user uploads a data file, then that file is transformed and imported into SQL. The file could be up to 50mb in size, and some times this process can take 30 minutes or sometimes even longer.
I realise I need to palm off the actual work to another process, and poll that process on the web page. I'm wondering what the best approach would be though? Being a web developer by trade, I'm finding all this new Windows Service stuff a bit confusing, and I just wanted somewhere to start.
So:
Can I do / should I being doing this with a windows service? if so, how?
Should I use WCF? If this runs under IIS, will I have problems with aspnet_wp.exe recycling and timing out my process?
clarifications
The data is imported into sql, there's no file distribution taking place.
If there is a failure, it absolutely MUST be reported to the user. The web page will poll every, lets say, 5 seconds, from the time the async task begins, to get the 'status' of the import. Once it's finished another response will tell the page to stop polling for status updates.
queries on final decision
ok, so as I thought, it seems that a windows service is the best idea. So as to HOW to get it to work, it seems the 'put the file there and wait for the service to pick it up' idea is the generally accepted way, is there a way I can start a process run by the service, without it having to constantly be checking a database table / folder? As I said earlier, I don't have any experience with Windows Services - I wondered if I put a public method in the service, can I call it somehow?
well ...
var thread = new Thread(() => {
// your action
});
thread.Start();
but you will have problems with that:
what if the import to sql fails? should there be any response to the client
if it fails, how do you ensure the file on a later request
what if the applications shuts down ... this newly created and started thread will be killed either
...
it's not always a good idea to store everything in sql (especially files...). if you want to make the file available to several servers why not distribute them via ftp ...?
i believe that your whole concept is a bit messed up (sry assuming this), and it might be helpful if you elaborate and give us more information about your intentions!
edit:
Can I do / should I being doing this
with a windows service? if so, how?
you can :) i advise you to create a simple console-program and convert this with srvany and sc. you can get a rough overview howto here (note: insert blanks after =... that's a silly pitfall)
the term should is relative, because you did not answer the most important question
what if a record is persisted to the database, telling a consumer that file test.img should be persisted, but your service hasn't captured it or did not transform it yet?
so ... next on
Should I use WCF? If this runs under IIS, will I have problems with aspnet_wp.exe recycling and timing out my process?
you probably could create a WCF-service which recieves some binary-data and then stores this to a database. this request could be async. yes. but what for?
once again:
please give us more insight to your workflow: what are you exactly trying to achieve? which "environmental-conditions" to you have (eg. app A polls db and expects file-records which are referenced in table x to be persisted) ...
edit:
so you want to import a .csv-file. well that changes everything :)
but i won't advise you to use a wcf-service (there could be a usage: eg. a wcf-service which has a method to insert a single row, then your iteration through the file would be implemented in another app... not that good, though).
i would suggest following:
at first do everything in your webapp (as you've already done), but rather use some sort of bulk-insert and do your transformation/logic on the database.
if you have some sort of bottle-neck then, i would suggest you something like a minor job-service, eg:
webapp will upload the file and insert a row to a job-table. the job-service is continiously polling the table/or gets informed via wcf by the webapp (hey, hey, finally some sort of usage for WCF in your scenario... :) ) and then does the import-job, writing a finish-note to a table/or set the state of the job to finished ...
but this is a bit overkill :)
Please see if my below comments helps you to resolve your issue:
•Can I do / should I being doing this with a windows service? if so, how?
Yes you can do this with a windows service. And I think that is the way you should be doing it. You can implement your own service to process your request or you can use the open source code Job Proccessor
Basically the idea is..
You submit a request for processing
the csv file in database table with
some status as not started.
Then your windows service picks up
the request from database table which
are not started and update them as in
progress status.
Once the processing is complete
succesfully /unsuccesfuly your
service updated the database table
with status as Completed / Failed.
And your asp.net page can poll to
database table for the current status
every 5 sec or so.
•Should I use WCF? If this runs under IIS, will I have problems with aspnet_wp.exe recycling and timing out my process?
you should not be using WCF for this purpose.
I have a flash based game that has a high score system implemented with a SOAP service. There are prizes involved and I want to prevent someone from using FireBug or similar to discover the webservice path and submit fake scores.
I considered using some kind of encryption on the data but am aware that someone could decompile the swf and work out how I did it.
I also considered using an IP whitelist but since the incoming data will come from the users IP and not the servers that won't work. (I'm sure I'm missing something obvious here...)
I know that there is a tried and tested solution for this, but I don't seem to be asking google the right questions to get to it.
Any help and suggestions will be appreciated, thank you
What you want to achieve is impossible. You can only make it harder for people to do. The best you can do is to use encryption and encrypt the SWF it self, which usually causes higher filesize and poorer performance.
The safest method is to evaluate or even run the whole game on the server. You can try to determine whether what the client sends you is possible at all. Rather than making sure people use your client, you're making sure people play the game according to your rules.
greetz
back2dos
All security is based on making things hard. It never makes things impossible. How about having your game register with a separate service when it starts up. It could use client information to build some kind of special code that would be unique for each iteration of the game. The game could morph the code in a way that would be hard to emulate. Then when the game is over the score gets submitted with the morphed code and validated on the server side.
We currently have fairly robust error handling functionality in our ASP.Net application.
We log all errors in the database, a text file on the server
and also send automated emails containing the error details back to our support people.
This all happens on the server of course.
We would like to capture (and retrieve) an image of the client browser at the time the error occurred to provide additional info for troubleshooting?
Is this at all possible?
If so what would be an elegant approach to this problem?
This is not technically impossible, but it is so impractical for nearly all purposes that it might as well be impossible. You would need a plugin running on the client's machine which can receive instructions from your error page to take the screenshot, connect to the server and upload it.
If your client screens have complex data which affects the state surrounding the exception, you should revisit your design to ensure all of that is recorded before it's sent to the client, so you can keep all relevant state tracked with a given exception.
Saying something is "impractical" is usually easier than actually trying to solve something that is difficult, but not technically impossible.
I have done some more research and have come across
an approach that allows one to get hold of the rendered html server side.
Further more, there are ways to also convert html to images
I will implement the solution using a combination of the two.
Capturing a client browser screenshot is not possible due to security and privacy reasons. What you can (and imho you should) do is capture the url and the browser version and try to reproduce it in the same environment.