Difference Between Verification And Validation Explain It With Example?

Verification and Validation example is also given just below to this table. 

Verification	Validation
1. Verification is a static practice of verifying documents, design, code and program.	1. Validation is a dynamic mechanism of validating and testing the actual product.
2. It does not involve executing the code.	2. It always involves executing the code.
3. It is human based checking of documents and files.	3. It is computer based execution of program.
4. Verification uses methods like inspections, reviews, walkthroughs, and Desk-checking etc.	4. Validation uses methods like black box (functional)  testing, gray box testing, and white box (structural) testing etc.
5. Verification is to check whether the software conforms to specifications.	5. Validation is to check whether software meets the customer expectations and requirements.
6. It can catch errors that validation cannot catch. It is low level exercise.	6. It can catch errors that verification cannot catch. It is High Level Exercise.
7. Target is requirements specification,application and software architecture, high level, complete design, and database design etc.	7. Target is actual product-a unit, a module, a bent of integrated modules, and effective final product.
8. Verification is done by QA team to ensure that the software is as per the specifications in the SRS document.	8. Validation is carried out with the involvement of testing team.
9. It generally comes first-done before validation.	9. It generally follows after verification.

Example of verification and validation are explained below:
Suppose we have the specifications related to the project than by checking that specifications without executing to see whether the specifications are upto the mark or not is what we have done in verification.

Similarly Validation of the software is done to make sure that the software always meets the requirements of the customer by executing the specifications of the project and product.

Note that the customer and end users are concerned in validation of the software.

It is also crucial to differentiate between end users, and customers. Considering example, if you are developing a library monitoring system, the librarian is the client and the person who issue the books, collect fines etc. are comes under the category of the end users.

Techniques or Methods of Verification and Validation

Methods of Verification

1. Walkthrough
2. Inspection
3. Review

Methods of Validation
1. Testing
2. End Users

1) Verification and Validation both are necessary and complementary.
2) Both of them provides its own sets of Error Filters.
3) Each of them has its own way of detect out the errors left in the software.

Lots of people use verification and validation interchangeably but both have different meanings.

Verification process describes whether the outputs are according to inputs or not, and Validation process describes whether the software is accepted by the user or not.

Loadrunner MAPI Protocol

The comments made here about the Loadrunner MAPI protocol are applicable for Loadrunner version 8.1. MAPI is Loadrunner’s Microsoft Exchange protocol.

I had reasonably straight forward objectives for a test I was preparing. Ramp up a few hundred users who would simulate use of Microsoft Exchange, i.e. users who were logging on, sending and receiving emails

I expected that Loadrunner would work with Outlook much like Loadrunner works with Internet Explorer. Loadrunner can simulate Internet Explorer with multiple users and sessions all working independently. Whilst working with the MAPI protocol I discovered that Loadrunner struggles to interact with Outlook. Some of the problems encountered were:


1) Not all of the statements worked. While they did not cause any problems, they just did not do what they were supposed to do. For instance:

The following statement should return a message ID, which it didn’t.

msgid = mapi_get_property_sz_ex(&mapi, "Message ID");

The following statement deleted a mail, but would not delete another email unless the logon statement was reissued on a fresh iteration:

mapi_delete_mail_ex(&mapi,"NextMail", "Show=all", LAST);

2) While the logon statement worked, it was not possible to logon a user to Outlook unless that user was logged onto the domain. Theoretically, the web_set_user will do this for you but it was not possible to introduce a web statement into the email script.

3) Configuring Outlook and permissions on the Injector machines was very much a trial and error process. Some handy hints:

Sessions can be run as local or global sessions. If running as a global session, the Loadrunner statements all finish with a suffix of _ex. The following settings are required: Define mapi as ‘MAPI mapi = 0;’

When using a global statement, stick ‘&mapi’ as the first parameter e.g.;mapi_logon_ex(&mapi, "Logon",

The logon statement is as follows:

mapi_logon_ex(&mapi, "Logon",

"ProfileName=Default Outlook Profile",

"ProfilePass=",

LAST);


To login a user, check the following settings:

The profile name can be found by; Right click Outlook; select properties; select show profiles. Funnily enough, the default Outlook profile is actually called ‘Default Outlook Profile’.

A mailbox for a user will be associated with an Outlook profile. This can be checked or amended by; Right click Outlook; select properties; highlight the profile and select properties; select email accounts; select view or change email accounts; select change / add / remove as appropriate.

In the logon statement above, password is not entered, mainly because it does not seem to be required.

More than one virtual user could be used per injector with this protocol, however, each virtual user per injector was accessing the same mailbox.It is worth increasing the mailboxes in size otherwise error messages will be returned if the mailbox fills up.

There is a setting in Exchange that detects if an automated program is running which may cause a popup message to be displayed. This will cause execution of the automation to stop. In fact, any popup will cause execution of the automation to stop.If anyone else has had a better experience with this protocol than I have, I would be very interested to hear about it.

You will find below a sample Loadrunner script that may help with your load testing project:

char * message;
char * msgid;
api;
int rc;
int i;
MAPI mapi = 0;
char msg_id;

Action()

{
// Get the Message identifier of current email message.

msgid = mapi_get_property_sz_ex(&mapi, "Message ID");

lr_output_message("the message id is %s", lr_eval_string("msgid"));
lr_start_transaction("P02S01_Logon");
mapi_logon_ex(&mapi, "Logon", "ProfileName=Default Outlook Profile", "ProfilePass=", LAST);
lr_end_transaction("P02S01_Logon", LR_AUTO);
lr_think_time(10);
lr_start_transaction("P02S02_Send");
mapi_send_mail_ex(&mapi,"SendMail",
"To={send}", //"To=Greg, David Marie",
"Subject=Test7 {GROUP}:{VUID} @ {DATE}",
"Body=Test Message! Please ignore.This is text inside the body of the email"
"111This is text inside the body of the email "
"111This is text inside the body of the email "
"111This is text inside the body of the email "
"111This is text inside the body of the email ",
"ATTACHMENTS", "File=C:\\readme.doc", "ENDITEM",
LAST);
lr_end_transaction("P02S02_Send", LR_AUTO);
lr_think_time(10);
lr_start_transaction("P02S03_Send");
mapi_send_mail_ex(&mapi,"SendMail",
"To={send}",
"Subject=Test8 {GROUP}:{VUID} @ {DATE}",
"Body=Test Message! Please ignore."
"222This is text inside the body of the email "
"222This is text inside the body of the email "
"111This is text inside the body of the email ",
"ATTACHMENTS", "File=C:\\readme.doc", "ENDITEM",
LAST);
lr_end_transaction("P02S03_Send", LR_AUTO);
msgid = mapi_get_property_sz_ex(&mapi, "Message ID");
lr_output_message("the message id is %s", lr_eval_string("msgid"));
lr_think_time(10);
lr_start_transaction("P02S04_Open_email");
mapi_read_next_mail_ex(&mapi,"NextMail",
"Show=all",
"Peek=false",
LAST);
lr_end_transaction("P02S04_Open_email", LR_AUTO);
/* lr_think_time(10);
lr_start_transaction("P02S05_Delete_email");
mapi_delete_mail_ex(&mapi,"NextMail",
"Show=all",
"Peek=false",
LAST);
lr_end_transaction("P02S05_Delete_email", LR_AUTO);
*/
for (i=0; i<(atoi(lr_eval_string("{randnum1}"))); i++)
{
lr_start_transaction("P02S04_Open_email");
rc = mapi_read_next_mail_ex(&mapi,"NextMail",
"Show=all",
"Peek=false",
LAST);
lr_end_transaction("P02S04_Open_email", LR_AUTO);
}
lr_think_time(10);
lr_start_transaction("P02S05_Delete_email");
mapi_delete_mail_ex(&mapi,"NextMail",
"Show=all",
"Peek=false",
LAST);
lr_end_transaction("P02S05_Delete_email", LR_AUTO);
return 0;

Performance Testing Concepts

Performance Testing : There are lot of Definitions available but the one mentioned in IEEE Glossary is as follows:

“Testing conducted to evaluate the compliance of a system or component with specified performance requirements. Often this is performed using an automated test tool to simulate large number of users. Also known as "Load Testing".

Or

“The testing performed to determine the degree to which a system or component accomplishes its designated functions within given constraints regarding processing time and throughput rate.”

The purpose of the test is to measure characteristics, such as response times, throughput or the mean time between failures (for reliability testing)

Performance testing tool:A tool to support performance testing and that usually has two main facilities: load generation and test transaction measurement. Load generation can simulate either multiple users or high volumes of input data. During execution, response time measurements are taken from selected transactions and these are logged. Performance testing tools normally provide reports based on test logs and graphs of load against response times.

Features or characteristics of performance-testing tools include support for:
• generating a load on the system to be tested;
• measuring the timing of specific transactions as the load on the system varies;
• measuring average response times;
• producing graphs or charts of responses over time.

Load test:
A test type concerned with measuring the behavior of a component or system with increasing load, e.g. number of parallel users and/or numbers of transactions to determine what load can be handled by the component or system

While doing Performance testing we measure some of the following:

1. Characterisitics (SLA) Measurement (units)
2. Response Time Seconds
3. Hits per Second #Hits
4. Throughput Bytes Per Second
5. Transactions per Second (TPS) #Transactions of a Specific Business Process
6. Total TPS (TTPS) Total no.of Transactions
7. Connections per Second (CPS) #Connections/Sec
8. Pages Downloaded per Second (PDPS) #Pages/Sec

The objective of a performance test is to ensure that the application is working perfectly under load. However, the definition of “perfectly” under load may vary with different systems.
By defining an initial acceptable response time, we can benchmark the application if it is performing as anticipated.

The importance of Transaction Response Time is that it gives the project team/ application team an idea of how the application is performing in the measurement of time. With this information, they can relate to the users/customers on the expected time when processing request or understanding how their application performed.

What does Transaction Response Time encompass?
The Transaction Response Time encompasses the time taken for the request made to the web server, there after being process by the Web Server and sent to the Application Server. Which in most instances will make a request to the Database Server. All this will then be repeated again backward from the Database Server, Application Server, Web Server and back to the user. Take note that the time taken for the request or data in the network transmission is also factored in.


To simplify, the Transaction Response Time comprises of the following:
1. Processing time on Web Server
2. Processing time on Application Server
3. Processing time on Database Server.
4. Network latency between the servers, and the client.


The following diagram illustrates Transaction Response Time.


Transaction Response Time = (t1 + t2 + t3 + t4 + t5 + t6 + t7 + t8 + t9) X 2
Note:
Factoring the time taken for the data to return to the client.

How do we measure?

Measuring of the Transaction Response Time begins when the defined transaction makes a request to the application. From here, till the transaction completes before proceeding with the next subsequent request (in terms of transaction), the time is been measured and will stop when the transaction completes.

Differences with Hits Per Seconds
Hits per Seconds measures the number of “hits” made to a web server. These “hits” could be a request made to the web server for data or graphics. However, this counter does not represent well to users on how well their applications is performing as it measures the number of times the web server is being accessed.

How can we use Transaction Response Time to analyze performance issue?
Transaction Response Time allows us to identify abnormalities when performance issues surface. This will be represented as slow response of the transaction, which differs significantly (or slightly) from the average of the Transaction Response Time.
With this, we can further drill down by correlation using other measurements such as the number of virtual users that is accessing the application at the point of time and the system-related metrics (e.g. CPU Utilization) to identify the root cause.
Bringing all the data that have been collected during the load test, we can correlate the measurements to find trends and bottlenecks between the response time, the amount of load that was generated and the payload of all the components of the application.

How is it beneficial to the Project Team?
Using Transaction Response Time, Project Team can better relate to their users using transactions as a form of language protocol that their users can comprehend. Users will be able to know that transactions (or business processes) are performing at an acceptable level in terms of time.
Users may be unable to understand the meaning of CPU utilization or Memory usage and thus using a common language of time is ideal to convey performance-related issues.

Relation between Load, Response Time and Performance:
1. Load is Directly Proportional to Response Time
2. Performance is inversely proportional to Response Time.

So, As and When the Load increases the Response Time Increases. As Response Time Increases, the Performance Decreases.

Hits Per Second
A Hit is a request of any kind made from the virtual client to the application being tested (Client to Server). It is measured by number of Hits. The higher the Hits Per Second, the more requests the application is handling per second.

A virtual client can request an HTML page, image, file, etc. Testing the application for Hits Per Second will tell you if there is a possible scalability issue with the application. For example, if the stress on an application increases but the Hits Per Second does not, there may be a scalability problem in the application.

One issue with this metric is that Hits Per Second relates to all requests equally.
Thus a request for a small image and complex HTML generated on the fly will both be considered as hits. It is possible that out of a hundred hits on the application, the application server actually answered only one and all the rest were either cached on the web server or other caching mechanism.

So, it is very important when looking at this metric to consider what and how the
application is intended to work. Will your users be looking for the same piece of
information over and over again (a static benefit form) or will the same number of users be engaging the application in a variety of tasks – such as pulling up images, purchasing items, bringing in data from another site? To create the proper test, it is important to understand this metric in the context of the application. If you’re testing an application function that requires the site to ‘work,’ as opposed to present static data, use the pages per second measurement.

Pages Per Second
Pages Per Second measures the number of pages requested from the application per second. The higher the Page Per Second the more work the application is doing per second. Measuring an explicit request in the script or a frame in a frameset provides a metric on how the application responds to actual work requests. Thus if a script contains a Navigate command to a URL, this request is considered a page. If the HTML that returns includes frames they will also be considered pages, but any other elements retrieved such as images or JS Files, will be considered hits, not pages. This measurement is key to the end-user’s experience of application performance.

Correlation: If the stress increases, but the Page Per Second count doesn’t, there may be a scalability issue. For example, if you begin with 75 virtual users requesting 25 different pages concurrently and then scale the users to 150, the Page Per Second count should increase. If it doesn’t, some of the virtual users aren’t getting their pages. This could be caused by a number of issues and one likely suspect is throughput.

Throughput
“The amount of data transferred across the network is called throughput. It considers the amount of data transferred from the server to client only and is measured in Bytes/sec.”

This is an important baseline metric and is often used to check that the application and its server connection is working. Throughput measures the average number of bytes per second transmitted from the application being tested to the virtual clients running the test agenda during a specific reporting interval. This metric is the response data size (sum) divided by the number of seconds in the reporting interval.

Generally, the more stress on an application, the more Throughput. If the stress increases, but the Throughput does not, there may be a scalability issue or an application issue.

Another note about Throughput as a measurement – it generally doesn’t provide any information about the content of the data being retrieved. Thus it can be misleading especially in regression testing. When building regression tests, leave time in the testing plan for comparing returned data quality.

Round Trips

Another useful scalability and performance metric is the testing of Round Trips. Round Trips tells you the total number of times the test agenda was executed versus the total number of times the virtual clients attempted to execute the Agenda. The more times the agenda is executed, the more work is done by the test and the application.
The test scenario the agenda represents influences the round Trips measurement.
This metric can provide all kinds of useful information from the benchmarking of an application to the end-user availability of a more complex application. It is not
recommended for regression testing because each test agenda may have a different scenario and/or length of scenario.

Hit Time:

Hit time is the average time in seconds it took to successfully retrieve an element of any kind (image, HTML, etc). The time of a hit is the sum of the Connect Time, Send Time, Response Time and Process Time. It represents the responsiveness or performance of the application to the end user. The more stressed the application, the longer it should take to retrieve an average element. But, like Hits Per Second, caching technologies can influence this metric. Getting the most from this metric requires knowledge of how the application will respond to the end user.
This is also an excellent metric for application monitoring after deployment.

Time to First Byte
This measurement is important because end users often consider a site malfunctioning if it does not respond fast enough. Time to First Byte measures the number of seconds it takes a request to return its first byte of data to the test software’s Load Generator.
For example, Time to First Byte represents the time it took after the user pushes the “enter” button in the browser until the user starts receiving results. Generally, more concurrent user connections will slow the response time of a request. But there are also other possible causes for a slowed response.
For example, there could be issues with the hardware, system software or memory issues as well as problems with database structures or slow-responding components within the application.

Page Time
Page Time calculates the average time in seconds it takes to successfully retrieve a page with all of its content. This statistic is similar to Hit Time but relates only to pages. In most cases this is a better statistic to work with because it deals with the true dynamics of the application. Since not all hits can be cached, this data is more helpful in terms of tracking a user’s experience (positive or frustrated). It’s important to note that in many test software application tools you can turn caching on or off depending on your application needs.

Generally, the more stress on the site the slower its response. But since stress is a combination of the number of concurrent users and their activity, greater stress may or may not impact the user experience. It all depends upon the application’s functions and users. A site with 150 concurrent users looking up benefit information will differ from a news site during a national emergency. As always, metrics must be examined within context.

Failed Rounds/Failed Rounds Per Second

During a load test it’s important to know that the application requests perform as
expected. The Failed Rounds and Failed Rounds Per Second tests the number of
rounds that fail.

This metric is an “indicator metric” that provides QA and test with clues to the
application performance and failure status. If you start to see Failed Rounds or Failed Rounds Per Second, then you would typically look into the logs to see what types of failures correspond to this metric report. Also, with some software test packages, you can set what the definition of a failed round in an application.

Sometimes, basic image or page missing errors (HTTP 404 error codes) could be set to fail a round, which would stop the execution of the test agenda at that point and start at the top of the agenda again, thus not completing that particular round.

Failed Hits/Failed Hits Per Second
This test offers insight into the application’s integrity during the load test. An example of a request that might fail during execution is a broken link or a missing image from the server. The number of errors should grow with the load size. If there are no errors with a low load, the number of errors with a high load should remain zero. If the percentage of errors only increases during high loads, the application may have a scalability issue.

Failed Connections
This test is simply the number of connections that were refused by the application during the test. This test leads to other tests. A failed connection could mean the server was too busy to handle all the requests, so it started refusing them. It could be a memory issue. It could also mean that the user sent bogus or malformed data to which the server couldn’t respond so it refused the connection.

Parameterization in Jmeter

Parameterization in Jmeter:

We parameterize the input to run the test with different set of data for each user. We will provide the data in a file and provide as input for a field.

For this we will create a .csv file in Excel and save it. For this example, we will parameterize four fields. They are fromPort, toPort, passFirst0 and passLast0.

 The details to corresponding fields are as follows:

We have our requests as shown below:

To add the data to the test we need to add the config element as below:

Right Click on Thread Group -> Add -> Config Element -> CSV Data Set Config

The CSV Data Set details were entered as follows:

Parameters for the CSV Data Set config is as below:

Attribute Description Required Name Descriptive name for this element that is shown in the tree. No Filename Name of the file to be read. Relative file names are resolved with respect to the path of the active test plan. Absolute file names are also supported, but note that they are unlikely to work in remote mode, unless the remote server has the same directory structure. If the same physical file is referenced in two different ways - e.g. csvdata.txt and ./csvdata.txt - then these are treated as different files. If the OS does not distinguish between upper and lower case, csvData.TXT would also be opened separately. Yes File Encoding The encoding to be used to read the file, if not the platform default. No Variable Names List of variable names (comma-delimited). Versions of JMeter after 2.3.4 support CSV header lines: if the variable name field empty, then the first line of the file is read and interpreted as the list of column names. The names must be separated by the delimiter character. They can be quoted using double-quotes. Yes Delimiter Delimiter to be used to split the records in the file. If there are fewer values on the line than there are variables the remaining variables are not updated - so they will retain their previous value (if any). Yes Allow quoted data? Should the CSV file allow values to be quoted? If enabled, then values can be enclosed in " - double-quote - allowing values to contain a delimeter. Yes Recycle on EOF? Should the file be re-read from the beginning on reaching EOF? (default is true) Yes Stop thread on EOF? Should the thread be stopped on EOF, if Recycle is false? (default is false) Yes Sharing mode All threads - (the default) the file is shared between all the threads. Current thread group - each file is opened once for each thread group in which the element appears Current thread - each file is opened separately for each thread Identifier - all threads sharing the same identifier share the same file. So for example if you have 4 thread groups, you could use a common id for two or more of the groups to share the file between them. Or you could use the thread number to share the file between the same thread numbers in different thread groups.

Now once the CSV Data Set is configured, we need to set the variables at appropriate position as shown:

The value is set as ${Variablename} for the required fields. For example here passFirst0 is set as ${FirstName} and passLast0 is set as ${LastName}.

Let us now verify the values are passed correctly to the required parameters from the csv file. To perform this we will add a Listener -> View Results tree as below:

In Thread group set the Number of users as 2 and run. We see that there are two sample results as we ran for two users. We check the first thread we see that fromPort is Frankfurt and toPort is London which is same as first record of our .csv file.

Now, let us verify the second thread results, we see that fromPort is London and toPort is New York. So for two different customers there are two different input provided.

In the same way we can check for the customer firstname and lastname also.

We can define one file and all requests can use same file for the parameters. In this way we can parameterize the data in Jmeter.

How to find the number of physical CPUs in Linux

1. How many physical CPUs does the server have?
2. How many cores on each CPU? Duo/Quad

In Linux it’s actually quite easy to get this info.
You could go through the /var/log/dmesg file or the /proc/cpuinfo file. We’ll look at the /proc/cpuinfo file.

Output of cat /proc/cpuinfo:
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 26
model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5570 @ 2.93GHz
stepping : 5
cpu MHz : 2933.548
cache size : 8192 KB
physical id : 1
siblings : 8
core id : 0
cpu cores : 4
apicid : 16
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 11
wp : yes

flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm syscall nx rdtscp lm constant_tsc nonstop_tsc pni monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr sse4_1 sse4_2 popcnt lahf_lm
bogomips : 5867.09
clflush size : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes : 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management: [8]
processor : 1
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 26
model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5570 @ 2.93GHz
stepping : 5
cpu MHz : 2933.548
cache size : 8192 KB
physical id : 0
siblings : 8
core id : 0
cpu cores : 4
apicid : 0
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 11
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm syscall nx rdtscp lm constant_tsc nonstop_tsc pni monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr sse4_1 sse4_2 popcnt lahf_lm
bogomips : 5866.85
clflush size : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes : 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management: [8]

1. To get Physical CPU count?
Run “cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep “physical id” | sort | uniq | wc -l”.
$ cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep "physical id" | sort | uniq|wc -l
Output : 2
The machine has two Physical CPU.

2. How many cores?
Run “cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep “cpu cores” | uniq”.
$ cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep "cpu cores" | uniq
Output: cpu cores : 4
The machine has four Cores
4 mean that each physical CPU has 4 cores on it. If cpu cores was 1 then the CPU’s single core.

How many virtual processors?

Run “cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep “^processor”"
$ cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep "^processor"
processor : 0
processor : 1
processor : 2
processor : 3
processor : 4
processor : 5
processor : 6
processor : 7
processor : 8
processor : 9
processor : 10
processor : 11
processor : 12
processor : 13
processor : 14
processor : 15
We have 2 physical CPUs x 4 cores each = 8 virtual processors. So there should be 8 Virtual Processors. But here the Output is 16. Why is it showing 16.

The processor number is showing 16, due to HT (Hyper-Threading) enablement.

However, it’s a bit different for HT (Hyper-Threading). If you get cpu core = 1 but the virtual processors = 2 then the CPU’s running HT. HT will only work with the SMP kernel.

How to Install the Apache Web Server on a Windows PC

The Apache HTTP Server is one of the most widely used web server softwares available. It is an open-source software that can be run on a large number of different operating systems, including Windows. This article will teach you how to install the Apache web server on your Windows PC.

Steps

1If you haven't done so already, download the Apache HTTPD Web Server from the Apache web site . Be sure to download the apache_2.2.16-win32-x86-no_ssl MSI installer here: (http://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi)


2.Save the file to your Windows Desktop.


3.Double click the msi file saved on your Windows Desktop. You will see a window that looks like this:


4.Click "Next>".


5.Click the radio button "I accept the terms in the license agreement"


6.Click "Next>".


7.On the next window, again click "Next>".


8.Next, fill in all the text boxes with the following information:
"Network Domain": localhost
"Server Name": localhost
"Administrator's Email Address": your email address


9.Make sure the radio button "for all users, on port 80, as a service - recommended" is selected.


10.Click "Next>".


11.On the next window, click the radio button "Custom", and then click "Next>".


12.On the next window highlight "Apache HTTP Server" and click the "change" button.


13.We are going to install all the packages and scripts in the path C:\Server\Apache2\ (assuming C: is your main hard drive). So in the text box "Folder name:" type in "C:\Server\Apache2\". The ending backslash is important.


14.After you have typed in the path, click "OK" and then click "Next>". At this point, you should see a window that looks like this:


15.Click "Install" to begin the installation.


16.Once the Apache installation software has finished installing all the files on your computer, you will see a final window letting you know the installation was a success. Click the "Finish" button.

To check that the software was in installed successfully, open your favorite browser and type "http://localhost/" into the address bar. 

The Difference Between HTTP and HTTPS

Most web addresses begin with "HTTP," which is an acronym for "Hyper Text Transfer Protocol." It's the protocol used to allow you to communicate with web sites.


"HTTPS" stands for "Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure." It means that information exchanged between you and a web site is encrypted and cannot be hijacked by someone who might want to electronically eavesdrop when you type a credit card number, a password, a social security number, or any other person information.

The purpose of the email is to encourage you to check for the "HTTPS" before you give financial information. Most web sites are not HTTPS, but when you click a link to make a purchase, many of them will direct you to an HTTPS site.


According to Verisign.com, a provider of Internet infrastructure services, Secure Socket Layer Encryption is a technology that protects Web sites and makes it easy to develop trust by means of an "SSL Certificate that enables encryption of sensitive information during online transactions. Each SSL Certificate contains unique, authenticated information about the certificate owner and a Certificate Authority verifies the identity of the certificate owner when it is issued. "

Just because a website uses such SSL encryption does not safeguard internet users from phishing and other schemes. When visiting websites that accept financial information online it is always a wise practice to make sure the online company is legitimate, has a good reputation in customer service and uses SSL encryption in their transactions

tnsnames.ora file unable to edit or access denied error-Solved

The tnsnames.ora file is where the Oracle Client stores database connection entries. These entries contain information that allows the ODBC driver to establish network connections to an Oracle Database, including hostname and port number. Users must create an entry in this file for each database they wish to access. The syntax for connection entries is strictly defined, so it's important to make sure they are formatted correctly.

The sqlnames.ora file is where the Oracle Client stores various network connection settings which apply to ODBC connections. Like tnsnames.ora, entries in the file follow a rigid format. In order to connect to EPM, users must add lines permitting an encrypted connection.

Copies of the tnsnames and sqlnet entries used to connect to the EPM database are included in the initial authorization email EPM users receive.Here i am showing the solution to resolve the access denied error when user wants to update it.

Follow these steps:

1.Begin by clicking on Start and go to All Programs go to Accessories-select Note pad

2.Right-click on Notepad and select Run as administrator button.In Notepad, click on File and goto Open. Switch the dropdown menu in the lower right hand corner of the screen from Text Documents (*.txt) to All Files.Then you are able to see the location of your tnsnames.ora file.

Locate the folder where you installed the Oracle Client (ORACLE_HOME). If you used the document EPM - Downloading and Installing Oracle 11g Client and ODBC Driver for Windows to install the Client, this folder should be named C:\Oracle32 or C:\Oracle64 depending on the version of the software you chose to install. 

3.Open the below location in your machine:

Go to  C(Windows) drive-app-Oracle-Product_11.2.0-Client_1-network

If files named tnsnames.ora or sqlnet.ora already exist in the folder, open them. Before making any changes to the files, click File goto Save As..and save them as tnsnames.ora.old and sqlnet.ora.old (be sure to switch the Save as Type: dropdown box to read All Files before saving). In doing this, you are creating backups of the original files in case you need to revert to the older versions at some point. If neither of these files already exists, hit Cancel to return to the Notepad editor.

Copy and paste the tnsnames connection entry you received  into the Notepad document. If you are editing an existing tnsnames.ora file, append the entry to the end of the file. Click File goto Save As... and save the file as tnsnames.ora. If you are prompted to replace the existing file,then click the button 'Yes'.

Copy and paste the sqlnet connection entry you received  email into the Notepad document. If you are editing an existing sqlnet.ora file, append the entry to the end of the file. Click File goto Save As... and save the file as sqlnet.ora. If you are prompted to replace the existing file, click 'Yes'.

4.To test your the ODBC connection, open a command prompt (Click Start, type 'cmd' in the search bar, and hit Enter). At the command prompt, enter the following command: 'tnsping connection_name'. For example, if you wish to test the connection to the EPQAS test database, type 'tnsping epqas'. 

You will get the output as: