Last day at work

Finally, the last day at work is done. I just managed to get the paperwork signed and made some more tests with my testing environment. Unfortunately, we couldn’t manage to set up the SCCM in the live system (NIPACS). Today, we went out for lunch and had a last talk about my time at Steria. Afterwards, I got the rest of this day off.

Skillen@Enniskillen

On Thursday and Friday I spend my working hours at Enniskillen with Matt. We had to set up some diagnostic workstations in a new hospital, which is not opened yet, the South West Acute Hospital. There is an old hospital in Enniskillen but this is really obsolete. We had to get some of the workstations which were used in the old hospital to bring them to the new hospital. We couldn’t take all of the workstations we planned to take with us because some doctors said that they would still use them so we had to take some more on Friday.

The new hospital is really huge and looks more like a hotel than a hospital. There was a security guy at the entrance who said that we aren’t allowed to enter the building without a access permission. Of course, Matt did not have a access permission and our contact person did not answer his phone, so we had to wait approximately 15 min, although we lost lots of time in the old hospital. After passing the security guy we could bring the PCs and screens upstairs and start wirering and configuring.

On Friday we had to return to the SWAH to install some more PCs and screens and to fininsh configuring.

Still doing the same

Unfortunately I’m still spending time on configuring Windows System Center Configuration Manager 2007 (SCCM). This piece of software just seems to be so slow! It feels like it takes ages for the software to recognize any changes I configure. The second problem is that Matt has just little time to help me, because there are just so many other things he has to do. So I also spend a lot of time on waiting. The next step will be to configure this SCCM environment in the NIPACS domain.

There is a song, its title sounds in this situation so frustrating and true at once..Maybe Tomorrow..

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.

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.

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.