I've now had a bit of time to look into some of the new features in HP LoadRunner 9.0

The SLA window is very useful - you can fill in "thresholds" - i.e. your clients performance requirements.

Let's say that under peak load they want a page (transaction) to return in less than 20 seconds, all you have to do is set up an SLA that only kicks in when the number of VUsers equals maximum and has a threshold of 20 seconds.

Here's how you Analyse the SLA:

.... it's not in Analysis by default!

Click here to view a quick report out of Analysis - the 0/Zero threshold means "I don't care about this transaction when there are less than 5 VUsers".

Forget using SLAs if you have any dynamic transaction names, e.g. "lr_start_transaction(lr_eval_string("{MapSelected}_LocateXY"));"..... I found that as a result couldn't use SLAs on one project.
The interface to adding/editing SLA simply doesn't cope with dynamic transaction names.

If you get it right - it will provide a pretty good "traffic lights" indication of how a run went. Also you don't have to trace lines on graphs to determine if requirements (SLAs) have been breached.

Just randomly stumbled across this site when I was looking for the codes to control my TV from my SKY+ remote:
http://www.satcure.co.uk/tech/digicode.htm

Discovered that my old sky (not Sky+) remote will control my new Sky+ box with a bit of tweaking. So that's been dusted off and will do for the kitchen.

Also got the Sky remote to switch the TV channel to 5 automatically - this is where I have the Sky box tuned to. I thought the AV button was missing from the Sky remotes, but it turns out the "Help" button does AV when the remote is in TV mode.

I'm now on facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/people/Stephen_ ... /654790140

I've been mucking around with it for a couple of weeks now and it's pretty good. But you've got to check the privacy settings - it's way too open by default.

Have caught up with some old school mates - when I get a minute I've got to write on some of walls, to say "hello".

A while a go I blogged about setting up postfix to send email via my ISP

This was to allow the emails to be sent out to a group of people, two weeks ago Sky (my ISP) replace smtp.sky.com with smtp.tools.sky.com - nice of them to tell me.

It was almost inevitable that the new server would be secured.

After some digging - here are the steps to get postfix to relay email to a secure smtp server.

Create this file:
cat /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
mail.my-isp.org test:testpass
putting your isps smtp server, I used smtp.gmail.com and my gmail account details.

Set the permissions:
chown root:root /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd && chmod 600 /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd

The hash the file:
postmap hash:/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd

Here's the bit where you find a diversity of information on the web...

Add these lines to /etc/postfix/main.cf:
# Added by SAR: SASL SUPPORT FOR SERVERS
#
# The following options set parameters needed by Postfix to enable
# Cyrus-SASL support for authentication of mail servers.
#
smtp_sasl_auth_enable = yes
smtp_sasl_password_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
smtp_use_tls = yes
smtp_sasl_security_options = noanonymous
smtp_sasl_tls_security_options = noanonymous


... These settings work for gmail!

Reconfigure postfix:
postfix reload

Try a test message, the log should look something like this:
Feb 11 23:47:59 milhouse postfix/smtp[12622]: 5F213D6607: to=<mytestaccount@mydomain.xyz>, relay=smtp.gmail.com[64.233.183.111]:587, delay=3.8, delays=0.05/0.03/2.1/1.6, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250 2.0.0 OK 1202772704 k10sm40977996nfh.17)
Feb 11 23:47:59 milhouse postfix/qmgr[12401]: 5F213D6607: removed

It is grumbling about certificates, but emails are being sent - I'll look into the certs another time.

I was recently performance testing ATM service management software for a "major banking client". We had to simulate a 20000 ATM load on the system.



Left to right: Me and Steve