Good Afternoon,
Perhaps this is a silly question, but I'm wondering if someone could help to point me in the right direction as I'm not even sure where to start.
I am starting to become adept at using CGIDEV2 tool to create a webpage using RPGLE. Currently all of my applications are internal, if a user wants to access them they need to be on the company network or VPN (outside of office).
How feasible is it to create an application that is public? My biggest fear is opening up our AS400 to potential hacker attacks, viruses, etc by making an application available publicly (no need to be on our network). I also can't even wrap my mind around how that would work while still being able to communicate back to the server from the client.
If anyone has done anything like this and can offer some feedback and perhaps point me to an article, guide, or video it would be much appreciated.
Thanks again
Related
I wrote a small program in vb.net and I'm looking for a simple way to keep people from just copying the executable and running it on another machine for reverse engineering without the installer. I understand that if people want the program bad enough they will figure out a way to get a hold of it, I'm basically just looking for some kind of deterrent to keep our competitors from walking around and copying it.
Logan,
The bad news is that you cannot stop people from reverse engineering your desktop application. You have 2 options:
Create a web application instead. The code will run securely on your server.
Use Remote Desktop Services. This way you can install your program on your server and let the users use it via RDS. Here is an article that illustrates the concept and how to implement it on Microsoft Azure: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc755055.aspx
The standard approach is to create a license key that will only work on a specific machine and store it in the registry. This can be something as simple as:
When your app starts get a unique machine id (http://www.dreamincode.net/forums/topic/181408-get-unique-machine-ids/)
Perform a one way hash on it
See if this value is stored in the registry
If it isn't, display a dialog displaying the unique machine id and asking for the 'license'
Accept input of the license so they don't need to ask again
You can manually calculate the one way hash yourself for computers that you want to run the software on.
This won't stop a determined hacker but it'll keep the 99.9% of people who can't hack your software honest.
I wrote a few iPhone apps using Core Data for persistent storage. Everything is working great but I would like to add the ability for users to back up their data to a PC (via WiFi to a PC app) or to a web server.
This is new to me and I can't seem to figure out where to begin researching the problem. I don't want to overcomplicate the issue if there is an easy way to implement this.
Is anyone familiar enough with what I am looking to do to point me in the right direction or give me a high level overview of what I should be considering?
The data is all text and would be perfectly stored in .csv files if that matters.
Unfortunately, I don't think there's a good all-purpose solution under the current SDK. Here are some ideas:
If you only want backup, you could just back up the whole sqlite file to the server or over wifi, but you then can't really use it with anything other than Core Data (and you might even run into trouble with iPhone-Mac compatibility, e.g. between 32-bit and 64-bit types).
A very robust solution would be to implement cloud storage with a REST API and sync the iPhone and desktop app to the server (this is what the Evernote app does, for instance), but that is obviously much more work.
You could also manually convert your data to a .csv and send that to the server or desktop, but parsing it could be problematic (and you'd have to worry about the data getting corrupted). If you did want to go that route, here is a tutorial.
I have a mdb file hosted on my site http://www.simplyfy.co.in/db/dbfile.mdb. I am developing an application which will be running on multiple machines and will contact the mdb file via internet. I am not sure how do i go about it as building the connection string for an online connection. Any help?
You do not - not at all, not even a little bit, want to expose a .MDB file directly over the internet. You really, really do not want to do this.
There are two reasons and I'll start with second, even if it works - and since it needs to be able to create a .ldb file if its not read only I'm not sure it will - it is liable to be horribly slow. Multi-user MDB can be bad enough over a local network.
The other reason is security, assuming it works at all you're going to really struggle to make this even vaguely safe.
Broadly speaking what you need to do is to create a web service that runs on your site that provides an secured API that your client applications can use to access your database - this gives you two benefits: 1) its much more secure (you're not exposing webspace with write permissions) and 2) it gives you the ability to change the back end data store if required without affecting the clients. There are various possibilities for implementing this but it will depend on the tools you have/are comfortable with.
I think it is possible to access the same way that access a local file, simply using the URL as Data Source. That is, the connection string looks like:
Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;User ID=...;Data Source=http://www.simplyfy.co.in/db/dbfile.mdb;Mode=..., etc
HTH
An recent article has prompted me to pick up a project I have been working on for a while. I want to create a web service front end for a number of sites to allow automated completion of forms and data retrieval from the results, and other areas of the site. I have acheived a degree of success using Selenium and custom code however I am looking to extend this to a stage where adding additional sites is a trivial task (maybe one which doesn't require a developer even).
The Kapow web data server looks to achieve a lot of this however I am told it is quite expensive (currently awaiting a quote). Has anyone had experience with this, or can suggest any alternatives (Open Source ideally)?
Disclaimer: I realise the potential legality issues around automating data retrieval from 3rd party websites - this tool is designed to be used in a price comparison system and all of the websites integrated with it will be done with the express permission of the owners. Where the sites provide an API this will clearly be the favoured approach.
Thanks
Realised it's been a while since I posted this, however should anyone come across it, I have had lots of success in using the WSO2 framework (particularly the mashup server) for this. For data mining tasks I have also used a Java library that this wraps - webharvest - which has achieved everything I needed
I'm thinking sugest to my organization, to implement SVN for all users in my orgazination.
What is the best form to implement that?
What is the best tool to do this?
What is the best process to implement this?
I have any ideas to implement that. But I would like to hear some success stories, not to waste time on things that will not work.
In my organization we have successfully implemented SVN using a Windows server running Apache and for client access we use TortoiseSVN. The server is configured to access our information via LDAP.
We not only use it for keeping track of HTML code that goes into a huge content management system, but we also use it to store supporting documents and wireframes for those pages that are in Microsoft Word document form. TortoiseSVN diff is amazing for our Word wireframes. It will use change tracking built into Word to show us the customer changes made to the wireframes.
The drawback is that TortoiseSVN did have a learning curve and we actually had to teach users how to use it and the users were already technically savvy. So it will be really difficult to get average users to use TortoiseSVN properly.