Schlagwort: work

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. 😛

Solving the last problems on my volnow projects and enjoy the last days…

Hi everybody,
it’s not so much happened at the late afternoon after any working day on this week, so hasn’t so much to tell about any event. I only still working on my last project while solving the last problems and bugs at Volunteer Now, but my supervisor got a new dog which he brought on monday to the office and the most of us looked and talked about the new dog…^^ While Kevin used his free days to breed his dog, I used the days to work on my community projects where one of them is based on ASP.Net. But I still have to wait for Kevin, because I had some problems where I had to ask him. Now, I look hopefully forward to the last days of this week, because Kevin have invited me and Diego to watch the football game between Spain and the Republic of Irland and on friday I will spend the last time with Kevin at his home before I have to pack my suitcases to depart Irland on sunday. Well, I have really enjoyed this spending time at Belfast and to get a new contacts like Kevin.

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.

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.

A relaxed long weekend…

Hey guys,
this long weekend is not so much happened what I can tell about it, but maybe about next weekend I could tell something, because we want to go to the Lisburn Leisure Park with Irlands biggest leisure water park and with a nice cinema for looking the new film MiB3. For all that, at my work I have developed some new webparts and new toolparts for our Sharepoint Server, in addition to them I have installed and configured a new virtualized developing server with all important tools which extend our developing infrastructure with more mobility and independency for our developing team. Well, I look forward to next days until we fly back to Germany and I enjoy my last complete weekend at Northern Irland.

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

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

Let us have a nice long weekend…!

Hey guys,
our last two weeks have been started and we have just two weekends for some nice adventures. Well, my week was pretty nice where I met a new guy at Volunteer Now. He come from Spain and is working as developer, too. He work with me and Kevin together on the same projects and hope, it will be a nice end of our internship. But I still working on the same project and develope the Visual Webparts for our Sharepoint Server and it will be never boring with this team where it’s sometimes funny with those irish people… ^^ This long weekend, I will go with Kevin to the cinema to watch the new film „MiB3“, but at first we go to some other sights or events. Well, I think it will be very funny and it’s nice to see same other sights outside of belfast. Let us what will be happened on this long weekend… 🙂

2 not working IBM Thinkpads = 1 working one

Today I got a special task. Jason told me to remove the mainboard from a IBM Thinkpad R40 and put it into another one. So I had 2 laptops one with a not working display and one bigger laptop with a not working mainboad. The easier way when they would be the same is to exchange the display but that wasn’t the case. Here we go I thought and so I started to take apart the smaller laptop with the not working screen. After a while I decided to search for the service manual to be a bit faster and yes I was faster then. I took the motherboad out of the unit and started with the 2nd laptop.  This time without the manual. After nearly 10 minutes I got the motherboard from that laptop. I compared both motherboards and noticed that the one from the bigger laptop has a longer wifi-card slot as the one from the smaller laptop. So I exchanged the wifi-card slot from the motherboards. Afterwards I put all together and checked if the „new“ laptop is working. It got power, it booted, it started windows and here is a working IBM Thinkpad R40.