Trip to Dublin

Yesterday Benny and myself decided to make a trip to Dublin. I’ve only seen the Dublin Airport at the arrival. So we had to visit Dublin for a longer time. We started the journey at 8 o’clock in the morning. Fortunately I could sleep in the bus. 2 and a half hour later we arrived at „Dublin Busaras“. At first we visited the GPO (General Post Office) and the „Spire of Dublin“ a 121 metre height pin-like monument. After this we went hungry to a little diner, where I ate Fish and Chips, that looks like the Alaska pollock filet. Invigorated we hiked to one of the largest park in Europe: The Phoenix Park. But my expectations weren’t fulfilled. I’ve only seen a pond full of rubbish and duckweed, a Zoo that we can’t visit because an expensive admission fee of 15 pounds and a field like a arable area. Only the „War Memorial Gardens“ were beautiful. But at this time it began to rain and there were only a few people in the park. So we decided to went to the „Kilmainham Gaol“ a very old prison where we took a guidance with a typical Irish speaking women. Otherwise I was disappointed: The viewing point at the Old Jameson Destillery was out of order and we had no access to the docks I wanted to visit. At the evening Benny and me went exhausted from the long walk to a pub.

Enhancing Network Performance

A project I’m working on that will never end is the enhancement of network performance, as there is always something that can be optimized.

So I did a lot of documentation work in the past week to reveal the most important things to optimize. After exposing the most crucial networking issues I started eliminating them: patching some more uplinks to improve redundancy, reconfiguring devices and so on. Unfortunately I cannot provide any details about the network here, as these facts are confidential.

But anyway, every configuration change I make and every uplink I patch is a small step towards a network which considers the best practices I have learned, e.g. the hierarchical network design:

Cisco Enterprise Campus 3.0 Architecture: The Layers of the Campus Hierarchy

Cliffs of Moher & City Racing

Yesterday we made a day tour to Limerick and the Cliffs of Moher. The day befor I ordered a taxi for 7 people for the next morning at 6:15 so we had to be infront of our apartments. We shared the taxi price so everyone had to pay only 2 Euro. We got a little bus and the bus driver called Bud started at around 6:55. At around 10 o’clock we arrived at Limerick to have a little walk around the castle. When we arrived the Cliffs at around 12:15 we got some warnings from the driver because there were already a few people who fell from the cliffs. It was very rainy so I decided to make pictures at fast as possible to go inside. The weather didn’t changed so I went through the atlantic gallery which was very interesting. After the visit at the cliffs we had lunch in a little village. I ate baked salmon fillet which was very tasty. We also saw the coast of Galway which was also very rainy. At around 19:00 we were back in Dublin.

Today we went into the city to buy some toast as we noticed that there is the Bavaria City Racing in Dublin city. It was awesome. The sound, the smell of the burned fuel and the cars and bikes were pretty cool. Pictures will follow. Too bad I can’t upload the 3D videos from my Nintendo 3DS.

English Breakfast

Today we served ourselves a substantial English breakfast consisting of soda bread, bacon, sausages, eggs and beans:

English Breakfast
English Breakfast

It was very delicious but way too much for me, as I normally don’t eat that much for breakfast. After the breakfast my rommates and me felt so saturated and full, we had to take a nap. I think we won’t have lunch today. 😉

Extending the Cisco Heaven

Another project I’m currently working on is the rollout of Cisco routers at Translink’s depots and garages, which are connected to the corporate network via ATM. At the moment these branch offices all use the standard all-in-one devices provided by the ISP. These devices unfortunately do not support advanced networking functions like VLANs, DHCP forwarding or routing protocols, which are needed for centralized network management. So that’s why they evaluate the Cisco router rollout.

After doing some internet research I configured my test device, a brand new Cisco 887VA, for PPP over ATM. After a failed test last week and a refinment of the configuration I successfully tested the setup at a train station near my office on Wednesday.

Cisco 887VA-SEC-K9
Cisco 887VA-SEC-K9

Birthday at ECIT institute

Yesterday, one of my colleagues was celebrating his birthday and all of the employees were making a great shindig for his birthday! They decorated the whole cafeteria and made him a big surprise! They brought sweets and cakes with them. By the way it was the 21st birthday of one of the colleagues from the IT-support where I have my placement. Kenny brought a big Magnum bottle of champagne with him, but no one drank a glass of it. He was very impressed and he enjoyed it. It was a great time we had good conversations and we all had a lot of fun.

Work is done

On Monday I had a great breakthrough for my project. As I already posted I had to form a VPN connection between two Cisco devices, but I only got one device allocated. The guys from the research cluster, who wanted to allocate me these devices needed the second one as spare part. So it seems to be the end for my project. But it wasn’t a setback for me I took it as a challenge to learn more as I supposed to be. I had the idea to form a VPN between a Cisco device and a Linux-server  as a site-2- site VPN. I thought it had to work because both devices speak the needed protocols and both can handle the encryption. So after long term of trying to get this thing work I found the right configuration. I had to read a lot of tutorials and I’d realized that the most of them are wrong. So I had to deal with the theory of VPN to find what I need. Also I couldn’t use the installed Ubuntu configuration files I had to wrote my own. But at the end of it all I got this thing work. Afterwards I only had to configure a few additional thing like DHCP, SSH and VLANs.

 

Done…