We would like to install Cytoscape on a server (Windows or Linux) and allow multiple users to connect simultaneously using a client software. Is this possible, and if so, what are requirements in regards to the server and the client software?
Certainly that's possible. There aren't any particular requirements, but keep in mind that for large networks, Cytoscape likes lots of memory. At any rate, we use X2Go on our Linux servers and it works really well for Cytoscape. Keep in mind, however, that a CytoscapeConfiguration directory will be created in each user's home and that apps and configuration information will be stored there.
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I need the VPS services for hosting my ASP.NET project.
However, it's not just asp.net hosting, I also need SQL Server, RabbitMq and either my running conrole app or my windows service.
So I read the suggestions to use Amazon Web Services as they provide first year for free.
However when I registered I found that I don't have a clue of where I am:
I don't see the option of creating a virtual machine with Windows
I don't see the option of setting up SQL Server on such the machine
and so on.
So I was wondering whether I'm in the right place?
Please advise if AWS can provide me with what I need or I came to the wrong place?
AWS can provide all that you listed, but you'll need to do some learning on your end.
Basically you create an EC2 instance, and then use RDP to remote into it, and you can install software and configure it to your hearts content - just like it was any other physical server.
If you want to use SQL Server, you'll have the choice of installing it directly on the instance using your own license, or using their 'hosted' version of SQL Server call RDS. You'll need to read about it and decide which option is better for your project - there is no single right way.
Lastly, I will point out that although the 'free-tier' is nice, except for a really small application (i.e. small db on a low traffic website), you may find out the 'free-tier' does not quite give you all the power you need to run a busy application. I would not base your decision on wether or not you should use AWS on how much 'free' stuff you can get. The free-tier is nice for learning, but plan on spending some money for a truly robust solution.
I would like to know if this is even feasible. And if so, what a possible approach would be.
I am thinking that the .exe would have to be made available through a web service running on a windows stack (asp.net or php) and that a direct heroku solution would not be the way to go.
If you do it as a externally, yes. The main trick there would be making the service on the windows box and making sure your service was secure. If you're going for cloud stuff, your best bet is probably to set your service up on a windows server on EC2 or Rackspace or [insert cloud provider here]. They're not as cheap as linux boxes because of the license cost, but shouldn't be too difficult to manage.
Unless Heroku has changed a lot from the last time I looked at it, the underlying OS was linux of some variety, so it's really unlikely that you could get an windows binary to run internally without bundling wine into your application (probably not worth trying to figure out).
I am looking for a dedicated server because shared webhosting solutions have some limitations.
I am going to start with one appliation (web server + db) but in the future I will need more resources for more applications. I am starting small so the price is very important right now the quality is more important though.
The requirements are like (not sure what I forgot)
scalable hw resources (memory, hdd, bandwith)
linux/unix based
able to install programs
ssh
ssl/https
backup solution?
unlimited number of outgoing emails
'simple scripts' ?
server user management
Update
Does the location of the server matters as I want to target my 'visitors' world wide?
Well I don't know where you are from and if it matters to you where the server's at. But I am very happy with swiss based hostfactory (I host some ecommerce solutions there). The support team reacts very fast and you'll get full control of the server (rdp access on windows, shell access on linux).
Check it out here: hostfactory
Hardware resources are scalable via the web interface.
Yes - location matters. If you are going with just one server location, you need to make your best guess as to where most of your visitors are going to come from.
The plumbing of the internet tends to be US centric, so if you are not sure, and have no legal restrictions on where your data can live, that may be your best (and often cheapest) option.
I went for linode
The situation is simple. I've created a complex Delphi application which uses several different techniques. The main application is a WIN32 module but a few parts are developed as .NET assemblies. It also communicates with a web service or retrieves data from a specific website. It keeps most of it's user-data inside an MS Access database with some additional settings inside the Registry. In-memory, all data is converted inside an XML document, which is occasionally saved to disk as backup in case the system crashes. (Thus allowing the user to recover his data.) There's also some data in XML files for read-only purposes. The application also executes other applications and wants for those to finish. All in al, it's a pretty complex application.
We don't support Citrix with this application, although a few users do use this application on a Citrix server. (Basically, it allows those users to be more mobile.) But even though we keep telling them that we don't support Citrix, those customers are trying to push us to help them with some occasional problems that they tend to have.
The main problem seems to be an occasional random exception that seems to pop up on Citrix systems. Never at the same location and often it looks related to some memory problems. We've p[lenty of error reports already and there are just too many different errors. So I know solving all those will be complex.
So I would like to go a bit more generic and just want to know about the possible issues a Delphi (2007) can have when it's run on a Citrix system. Especially when this application is not designed to be Citrix-aware in any way. We don't want to support Citrix officially but it would be nice if we can help those customers. Not that they're going to pay us more, but still...
So does anyone know some common issues a Delphi application can have on a Citrix system?
Does anyone know about common issues with Citrix in general?
Is there some Silver Bullet or Golden Hammer solution somewhere for Citrix problems?
Btw. My knowledge about Citrix is limited to this Wikipedia entry and this website... And a bit I've Googled...
There were some issues in the past with Published Delphi Applications on Citrix having no icon in the taskbar. I think this was resolved by the MainFormOnTaskbar (available in D2007 and higher). Apart from that there's not much difference between Terminal Server and Citrix (from the Application's perspective), the most important things you need to account for are:
Users are NEVER administrator on a Terminal or Citrix Server, so they no rights in the Local Machine part of the registry, the C drive, Program Folder and so on.
It must be possible for multiple users on the same system to start your application concurrently.
Certain folders such as the Windows folder are redirected to prevent possible application issues, this is also means that API's like GetWindowsFolder do not return the real windows folder but the redirected one. Note that this behaviour can be disabled by setting a particular flag in the PE header (see delphi-and-terminal-server-aware).
Sometimes multiple servers are used in a farm which means your application can run on any of these servers, the user is redirected to the least busy server at login (load balancing). Thefore do not use any local database to store things.
If you use an external database or middleware or application server note that multiple users will connect with the same computername and ip address (certain Citrix versions can use Virtual IP addresses to address this).
Many of our customers use our Delphi applications on Citrix. Generally speaking, it works fine. We had printing problems with older versions of Delphi, but this was fixed in a more recent version of Delphi (certainly more recent than Delphi 2007). However, because you are now running under terminal services, there are certain things which will not work, with or without Citrix. For example, you cannot make a local connection to older versions of InterBase, which use a named pipe without the GLOBAL modifier. Using DoubleBuffered would also be a really bad idea. And so on. My suggestion is to look for advice concerning Win32 apps and Terminal Services, rather than looking for advice on Delphi and Citrix in particular. The one issue which is particular to Citrix that I'm aware of is that you can't count on having a C drive available. Hopefully you haven't hard-coded any drive letters into your code, but if you have you can get in trouble.
Generally speaking, your application needs to be compatible with MS Terminal Services in order to work with XenApp. My understanding is that .NET applications are Terminal Services-compatible, and so by extension should also work in a Citrix environment. Obviously, as you're suffering some problems, it's not quite that simple, however.
There's a testing and verification kit available from http://community.citrix.com/citrixready that you may find helpful. I would imagine the Test Kit and Virtual Lab tools will be of most use to you. The kit is free to use, but requires sign-up.
Security can be an issue. If sensitive folders are not "sandboxed" (See Remko's discussion about redirection), the user can break out of your app and run things that they shouldn't. You should probe your app to see what happens when they "shell out" of your app. Common attack points are CHM Help, any content that uses IE to display HTML, and File Open/Save dialogs.
ex: If you show .chm help, the user can right-click within a help topic, View Source. That typically opens Notepad. From there, they can navigate the directory structure. If they are not properly contained, they may be able to do some mischief.
ex: If they normally don't have a way to run Internet Explorer, and your app has a clickable URL in the about box or a "visit our web site" in the Help menu, voila! they have access to the web browser. If unrestrained, they can open a command shell by navigating to the windows directory.
Is it possible to emulate incoming messages using Indy (if it's of any importance: I'm using Indy 10 and Delphi 2009)? I want to be able to create these messages locally and I want Indy to believe that they come from specific clients in the network. All the internal Indy handling (choice of the thread in which the message is received and stuff like that) should be exactly the same as if the message would have arrived over the network.
Any ideas on that? Thanks in advance for any tips.
What you want to do has nothing to do with Indy, as you would need to do this on a much lower level. The easiest way to make Indy believe that messages come from a specific client is to inject properly prepared packets into the network stack. Read up on TCP Packet Injection on Google or Wikipedia. EtterCap is one such tool that allows to inject packets into established connections. However, this is definitely going into gray areas, as some of the tools are illegal in some countries.
Anyway, all of this is IMHO much too complicated. I don't know what exactly you want to do, but a specially prepared client or server is a much better tool to emulate certain behaviour while developing server or client applications. You can run them locally, or if you need to have different IP addresses or subnets you can do a lot with virtual machines.
Indy doesn't have any built-in mechanisms for this but thinking off the top of my head I would recommend building a small test application (or a suite) that runs locally on your development machine and connects to your Indy server application to replay messages.
It should be irrelevant to your Indy server applications if a TCP connection is made either locally or from a remote host as the mechanisms by which a server thread is created and a command processed is identical to both scenarios.
My last gig involved using Indy and all our testing was done with a similar Resender type application that would load local message files and send these to the Indy server app.
HTH and good luck!
One thing you can do would be to create virtual machines to run your test clients, that way they will not be seen as "local machine", and its fairly simple to create a complex network with VMS -- provided you have enough memory and disk space. The other advantage of testing with VM's is you can eliminate the development environment completely when its time to focus on deployment. Amazing how much time that saves alone.
VirtualPC is a free download from Microsoft and works fairly well. VMWare has another option, but costs a little more to get started. For development purposes, I prefer the desktop versions but the server versions also work well. You will still need to have a license to install the virtual OS. MSDN membership is probably the cheapest way to go, and allows you to build test environments for other flavors of the OS.
Indy has abstract stack mechanism for crossplatform support (IDStack.pas) I think u can hack the stack for windows (IdStackWindows.pas). It is a class. U can even consider to derivate it and override some functions to do the hack.