Last Saturday, there were Kings of Lyon, a tribute band of Kings of Leon, playing at the Empire’s. Oli, Tim, Tobias and I really like the songs of Kings of Leon, e.g. „Sex on Fire“ or „Use somebody“, but this cover band didn’t satisfy our expectations. The singer said that he sang all week long and therefore his voice would be kind of damaged. Therefore I think it was not their best performance, but nevertheless, most of the people in die pub let it all hang out.
Autor: Rene Skillen
Sunny Days
This week starts with some really nice days. The sun is shining all day long since Monday and it really feels good. Yesterday Mr. Bavar and Mrs. Neumann visited us at our placements and our appartement. Afterwards we had some nice hours talking about our experiences here in Belfast and our impressions about the city, the people and the atmosphere at work. Mrs. Neumann really attracted interest in the dress code and the casual friday.
More than half of the 8 weeks are over now and to be honest, I’m really looking foward to get back home. I really like Belfast and also it’s people but you know, there’s no place like home.
New Project?
Unfortunately, my current project still isn’t completed due to problems with Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2007 R3. This piece of software is just horrible. Matt wanted to have a look at it last week but he didn’t have any time so I have to wait. With a bit of luck, we can fix the last problems and finish this step today. Last Friday, Matt told me, that we will try to push some BIOS updates with SCCM. The next step of the project will be, to configure some servers and I think SCCM within the NIPACS domain.
Again a perfect evening
Yesterday, Tim, Oli and me decided to go to the cinema to watch the film „The Dictator“. We had to get some things done, so we started at 19:30 and the film started at 19:40. Going to the ciname takes just 3 minutes on foot, so we had no problems reaching the cinema in time. I thought this film could be either very funny or just nonsence. To be honest: it was both of it. Some scenes really made me laugh but others just made me shake my head.
Due to the fact, that we had no time for lunch before, we had some dinner at Nando’s afterwards. They are specialised in chicken. We were a bit disappointed when we saw the size of the dish. There was not nearly as much food as we expected on our plates but is was really tasty.
The last stop on this evening was Filthy McNasty’s. It was just a perfect idea, because there was live music and it was just awesome. The guy’s name who played is Mark Graham. I really like this evenings with live music. There seem to be so many musicians playing their songs in Belfast’s pubs and this is just amazing. I will really try to find some good locations offering great live music acts when I’m back to Berlin.
Sightseeing during working hours
One advantage of my placement is that I see a lot of Northern Ireland’s landscape. On Monday, I met with Matt in the office and we started at about 10 o’clock. We had to visit 3 different hospitals and initially a company, called AMI, too. AMI is a company, which cares about WEEE (Waste Electronic and Electrical Equipment) and ITAD (IT Asset Disposal) in Northern Ireland. Matt forgot, that he arranged an appointment for Tuesday, so he pulled around the steering whell within the roundabout and continued to the first hospital. We had some hard drives containing patient data, which had to be send to IBM for replacement. So these hard drives had to be erased on a very secure way, i.e. going through two huge magnets for three times. I think this is a very rude way of erasing a hard drive, because on Tuesday, it sounded like a yelping dog or something similar. Arriving at the first hospital, we had to calibrate an EIZO screen which is used at a diagnostics station, i.e. doctors view MRTs and other electronical patient pictures, so the screens have to be fully functional. This took about half an hour. Afterwards we got to the second hospital. There was a problem with an user account, but it was already solved when we arrived, so this job didn’t take long. In the third hospital, there was a hard drive which had to be replaced, which took maybe 15 minutes. I think during the whole day, we covered about 300km. Driving in the car took definetly longer than fixing the problems, but as I already said..sightseeing during working hours is not too bad. We arrived at 5 o’clock in the office and there, Oli waited for me because we had to get some groceries for lunch. We made some chilli con carne for lunch and it was very tasty.
My birthday in Belfast
This Friday was my birthday. On Thursday night, we waited for midnight to come and had a birthday beer. Tim and Oli surprised me with a very nerdy T-Shirt and a voucher for a dinner and a drink at a location I can choose. On Friday, Tim, Tobias, Oli and me had lunch at the Kitten Bar and just watched a film. We all were a bit tired so we decided to go out on Saturday. There was a live act at „The Empire„, a cover band of the Foo Fighters, the Four Fighters. Unfortunately, except of the volume, there was nothing knocking our socks off! So we decided to go after half an hour and got some food from KFC, to put oil in troubled waters.
Back in our apartment we listened to some music and relaxed. It was a strange feeling, celebrating my birthday so far away from my girlfriend and my family but Tim und Oli made a great job, so I had a really nice birthday.
Nearly done
The project I described earlier, is nearly done. After installing ESXi, I set up 7 virtual machines. Two Windows Vista clients, one Windows 7 client, three Windows Server 2003R2 servers and one Windows Server 2008R2 server. I build a small domain, consisting of one domain controller, a small Windows Server 2003R2 cluster (two nodes), three clients for testing purpose and one 2008R2 server which shall run SQL Server 2005 and Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007R2. Unfortunately I had to interrupt my work, due to a missing DVD.
I heard, that I was scheduled to participate in a big project, which is very actual at Steria. My tasks would have been configuring many servers, configuring SAN controllers, configuring RAIDs and LUNs but unfortunately the customer now wants to use HP hardware instead of IBM hardware, so the project can not start yet and I hope, that it starts within my stay here at all.
Getting the third week started
Thanks to the bank holiday, this week starts today, Tuesday. I’m still overwhelmed by all the impressions I got this weekend. I just can highly recommend to visit Tobi’s blog and read his post about our weekend. He describes our coast trip, which I described earlier, with much blood, sweat and tears and I think it’s worth reading it. I’m still working on building a Windows environment with an ESXi Hypervisor, which was delayed due to Installation problems. The versions 3.5 and 4.1 did not cooperate with the hardware I have to use, so I was told to install Citrix XenServer. I spend a lot of time working with ESXi Hypervisor in Berlin so I’m very familiar with this product and its advantages. I missed many of them when I tried to set up VMs with XenServer. So I decided to spend more time on getting ESXi installed and I succeeded! Version 5.1 seems to be compatible and finally I can handle the basic work.
Our coast trip
Hey!
During the last week, Tobi, Tim, Oli and me decided to hire a car for the weekend and see something of Northern Ireland’s beautiful landscape. Saturday, Tim and Oli got the car — which was advertised as a VW Passat on the website and turned out to be a Vauxhall Zafira — and picked up Tobi and me. We used the chance to go to a Lidl, which is some miles away from our apartment.
Today, our journey brought us to Giant’s Causeway, the Bushmill Distillery, and the Carrick-a-Rede Rope Bridge. We took a lot of pictures, unfortunately I can’t upload all of them, but here are at least some of them. We used the selftimer to take one of the pictures..We put my camera and Tim’s on the roof of the car and after taking the photo, I took my cam back into the car..Tim did not..so his camera had some fresh air for about one mile..We looked very surprised when we got out of the car and spotted Tim’s camera..
The impressions were just amazing..So have a look…
A little project
During this week I spend some time on configuring workstations for the NIPACS project, which was introduced in 2009. NIPACS means Northern Ireland Picture Archiving Communications System and enables hospitals to view digital medical patient data like MRTs on the computer and save it centrally in two data centers within Belfast. The advantage which comes with this technology is that medical patient data can be accessed by every hospital in Northern Ireland. The diagnostic workstations use very powerful hardware, meaning two Quad Core processors and 12 GB of RAM. Furthermore two high-definition displays of EIZO are used to view the medical pictures.
On Friday I got a little project. I have to set up a ESXi Hypervisor and configure a small Windows domain, including a Windows domain controller, a Microsoft SQL Server and some Windows Vista / Windows 7 clients. ESXi is already installed and the virtual machines have to be installed next week.