Autor: Tim Heckmann

Leaving On A Jet Plane

Now it has come, the day of departure.

After leaving the brightly polished house in a taxi taking us to Europa Buscentre (which is actually only a 5-minute walk away), we bought our bus tickets and got ready for a 2 hour roller coaster ride back to Dublin Airport again, where we are now sitting and waiting for the pilot to start in the direction of our beloved hometown Berlin.

To soothe you: I have not turned on my iPhone in the plane right before the start to post this. To be honest I wrote this post yesterday and scheduled it to be published today right at the time our plane is planned to departure to Berlin.

Finally, to make a connection to the title, enjoy the legendary song:
John Denver – Leaving on a Jet Plane

Thank you!

In my probably second to last post in this blog I would like to take the chance to say thank you.

Thank you to Kevin Shine and his team at RSM Tenon, who organized our time here in Belfast and cared about us. You did a really good job and made our stay here very comfortable and enjoyable.

Thank you to Laurence Roberts from City Resorts, who provided our accommodation and always solved our problems concerning the house as fast as possible.

Thank you to the IT department at Translink for letting me work on many interesting projects and gain valuable on-the-job experience working in a live environment supporting many users across multiple locations. You all made me feel very welcome and I really enjoyed working with you.

Thank you to afib and OSZ IMT for making this internship possible at all.

I hope I did not forget anyone; if I did: thank you, too!

Farewell

Yesterday it was the time to say goodbye to my colleagues at Translink. To be honest I was a bit sad I have to leave now. I really enjoyed working on all these interesting projects with the nice people at Translink.

On my last day I finished some paperwork (documentations, trainings records etc.) and handed over the running projects to my colleagues.

I also had lunch with my supervisor and two colleagues at Gallopers, a sandwich and coffee bar, where I had a traditional Ulster Fry.

Finally I tidied up my desk – well, at least I tried to – so that the next placement student from OSZ IMT, who is starting on Tuesday, finds a clean and neat desk on his arrival … but I didn’t succeed. 😛

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.

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.

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

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