Tag: 10. Juni 2012

The Weekend

The last whole weekend here in Belfast run out. Next weekend we will fly home. So, I decided to do anything special, as far as practicable in Belfast. A bird twittered me something about the Lagan Valley LeisurePlex. This is the „largest leisure pool of its kind in Northern Ireland“ located in Lisburn – approximately 30 minutes away from our train station. At noon we went to the train and drove directly to Lisburn. After a few minutes walk we reached the leisure park, which was full of families with her children. We had a lot of fun there and it was something else, what I can do in Northern Ireland. After this event I was tired and hungry. So we searched somewhere to eat something and found a Chinese restaurant, where we could eat from a buffet for a fixed price – Therefore a all-you-can-eat. I tried a lot of the Chinese food that was very delicous. Maybe a little bit to much. Afterwards I had stomachache.

I went saturated  home and had a small nap. But not so long, because I want to see the European championchip. So the 3 FIANs Benny, Chris and Timo and myself went together with the German flag to a pub. Unfortunately the match was not so exiting, but we had won and this is the main point.

The Sunday began with a typical British breakfast at Maggie May´s. Maybe I hadn’t choose the big „Bumper Fry“ with 2 eggs, 2 bacon, sausage, potato bread, soda bread, hash brown, mushrooms, beans and chips. After this huge meal I had to sleep again.

Lisburn Leisure Park

Water pools and waterslides...
Water pools and waterslides...

Yesterday was a relaxed day, too. Well, I have found a nice place where we can spend the time on sunday, but this I have already told you and it was nice. Maybe, we have slightly increased expectations, because the water leisure pool looks on the pictures bigger than the real look, but I think we are accustomed to bigger and more spectacular water parks from Germany. However, we have enjoyed this wet experience. Unfortunataly, there were to many kids on this day where we can’t really relaxed in the pool and have some fun waterslides, it was still too small for those many visitors. After all, we have a little hightlight in our favourite pub the morning star and enjoyed the football match between Spain and Italy. We have ordered some steaks which are looked very nice and they were very delicious, so we have ended this day with a great meal and now we watch the last football match at the evening.

Ireland vs. Croatia – 1:3

The game started really bad for Ireland. In the 3rd minute  Croatia already it’s first goal. What followed was a fishy game by the Croatien players but then in the 19th minute St. Ledger made a nice head goal. Befor the end of the first half Croatia made another goal. During the half time break I was thinking about some Irish people and what they said about they football players.

Every Irish person says that they have a bad football team.

Maybe that’s the reason why I like Irish Rugby more than football. In the end Ireland lost the game with a 1:3 against Croatia. Let’s see how they handle the next game on Thursday.

Enhancing Network Performance … Again

Last week I boosted network performance at Translink again.

The core switches used to be connected via single 1Gbit/s links, whereas all other ports are also 1Gbit/s. Unsurprisingly they had problems with several connections traversing the core. So I decided to increase the bandwidth (and by the way improve redundancy) by configuring an 8-port EtherChannel between each two core switches.

Of course the redundancy could also be improved by just patching more links between the switches, but in this case there would only be one usable link at a time, because the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) would block the remaining links to prevent a loop in the network. By configuring the EtherChannel the switches consider the eight ports of the EtherChannel as one logical port and load-balance the traffic over all links.

The torch in Belfast

Hi guys,

the Olympic Torch was on Wednesday in Belfast and I was there. Belfast has organized a big celebration, to welcome the torch. Martin and I have waiting for the torch, a little bit outside from the celebration, because it was at the main places to much scramble for us. Besides we had more place to make pictures.

As the torch finally came, we are run with the torchbearers through the complete city, to make good pictures and to see the torch.

It was very exhausting, but we have got many good pictures. On the end of the run, the torch came on stage in front of the city hall. There was lit, a big fire in a goblet.

A interesting information incidentally: each torchbearer has his own torch, so it exist 8000 pieces.
I had never thought, that really each his own torch has.

Best regards from Belfast
Benjamin

Belfast Burger Bash

Yesterday we checked out a bar/restaurant that was recommended to us by some colleagues: The Morning Star.

As starter we had a broccoli blue cheese soup, which was already very good, but the restaurant is famous for its identically named Morning Star Burger, so of course we tried it.

The burger is very delicious, to cut the matter short, it’s legendary! 😉

Domain Controller Upgrade

We finally started upgrading the domain controllers (DCs) here at Translink, which are currently running Windows Server 2003, to Windows Server 2008 R2. Yay! As I told you in a previous post, this is necessary for the Exchange 2010 migration to start.

On Thursday after lunch Rory, a server technician working for Northgate, came to our office to support us with the migration.

First we set up a temporary (virtual) DC, moved the services and copied the FSMO roles to it.

Now we could start upgrading the DCs. As Windows Server 2008 R2 doesn’t allow an in-place upgrade from Windows Server 2003, we had to do a complete new installation. So we demoted the first DC to a normal member server and then removed it from the domain. Now we could install the new operating system, get a cup of tea, do some basic configurations, join the freshly installed server to the domain and run dcpromo to make it a DC again. Of course we repeated this procedure for all DCs, one at a time.

Finally we moved the FSMO roles back to the DCs they were initially running on, moved the services … and Bob’s your uncle! 😉

In the end we left the office at approximately 19:30.