Schlagwort: work

New Week @ VolunteerNow

Hi everybody,
one of our last weeks at Belfast are been started, but it was not so much happened in the first days of this week. Well, we just went back to our old stuff of project and it’s only some new tasks for my Sharepoint project. My new tast is to design the new layout of the Sharepoint website with new webparts. This will be happened by Visual Webparts in Visual Studio 2010, so it will be programmed in C# and the .NET Framework 3.5, but I am looking very interesting forward to the next week, because we will get a new member for our team, it’s a apprentice, too. He coming from Spain and he has the same certificate like us, he succeded the CCNA certification, too. Therefore, I think that’s will be very interesting and I will get a nice chance to contact a new guy. However, I am hopefully looking forward to a successfull ending of our practical training.

Yours faithfully,
Rico Meehs

The fifth week will be ended, but what coming at last weeks? It will be seen.

Hi guys,
it’s me again, our fifth week will be end and it was a really nice one, of course the weather had a good timing to be a beautyfull sunny week. At the last three days of the working week, it was very relaxed and have a nice introducing by Kevin in the programming languages ASP.NET & C# for developing webpages, because I want to use this languages for developing project in my community, too. At the beginning of this week, it was something happend in my project at my work, of course there was a some upgrading problemes on Microsoft Dynamics Server, but I have solved this problemes with manually upgrade steps and now I working for the last steps to finish this project. Well, the week was really funny and interesting. At last one, I have got new contacts at Volunteer Now which I like to hold above this nice work placement at Belfast. By the way, I think you have enjoyed this week, too.

Active Directory Upgrade

This week I was introduced to another project at Translink: Plans are to upgrade the Active Directory infrastructure from Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2008 R2. The project is realized in cooperation with the IT service provider Northgate.

One principal reason for running this project is that another project depends on this Active Directory upgrade: the migration from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010.

A project assistant from Northgate came to the office to talk with my colleagues and me about the hardware (physical and virtual) and software requirements as well as the necessary network (re)structuring.

Getting Started with Microsoft Hyper-V

Translink is about to start a new virtualization project. They decided to use Microsoft Hyper-V as the hypervisor. The virtualization cluster, which is built on HP servers consists of 4 nodes which each have 2 6-core Intel Xeon processors and 96 GB of memory.

The first thing to do was to mount the servers in the rack which was done by my colleague John and me.

John cabling the power supply units

After approximately 90 minutes of work and 2 papercuts from the damn HP packaging (I have never got injuries from Dell packaging) the job was done:

the 4 virtualization nodes

Sensors and Connected Health

As written in my last posts I mentioned the project „Sensors and Connected Health“. Now we have get new instructions from our IT-supervisor Damien. At the last days we gathered informations about touchscreen devices like All-in-One PCs and tablet-PCs. On this devices they want to show the informations from the connected person with the medical sensors. Also a big TV-screen is an opportunity. Yesterday arrived the ordered outdoor WLAN access point and Jannik and me tested the device. Unfortunately the extra antenna doesn’t arrived, but it has already an in-built antenna. Today Damien showed us the ALS Simulator and the BioRadio. The Advanced Life Support Simulator is a realistic interactive training manikin for simulating a wide range of advanced life saving skills. He has human attributes like pulse, breathing and he can also make some noise. The BioRadio 150 is a wireless acquisition system capable of recording, displaying and analyzing physiological signals from users in real time. But we don’t know how exactly we must connect this device to the manikin. We tried a little bit, have measured the pulse but it don’t works or we can’t interpret the data from the monitoring software. I don’t know but maybe Damien tell us tomorrow. So I become a specialist in medicine 😉

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.

New Tasks, New Toys (Follow-Up)

As you can read in an earlier post, I had to set up a testing environment for Cisco Smart Install, which is now up and running.

The Smart Install director (the device which manages iOS and configuration deployment to the Smart Install clients) acts as a DHCP server and configures new switches coming factory settings with an IP address, default gateway and a TFTP server address (DHCP option 150). Right now the director deploys images and configuration files only to devices with specific MAC addresses, as I only want to configure my test client at the moment. It is also possible to filter deployment based on device model and type or IP address (if already configured).

Cisco Smart Install console output on client
Cisco Smart Install console output on client

After being upgraded and/or reconfigured by Cisco Smart install the switch is ready to be used in the corporate network without the need to be configured manually. This feature is also called zero-touch deployment. The Smart Install director console output shows the successful image and config upgrade process:

Cisco Smart Install Director console output
Cisco Smart Install Director console output

Network Documentation

As most of you employed in IT may know, there are always some projects you do „by the way“ (e. g. Oliver, René and Mateusz should know what I mean). 😉

I also got (another) „by the way“ project: document the whole Translink corporate network from core to access layer and from OSI layer 1 to 3. This includes all networking devices as well as every cable that connects two devices.

I think I will use a top down approach and start with the network core and WAN links between the sites and then care about the inhouse network site after site. Probably I will also have to develop a hostname scheme as not all devices in the network have unique hostnames yet.

I’ll tell you what I make out of it in later posts.

Have a nice weekend!

The third week will ending…

Hey guys, every week will ending and this one, too. It was really nice the last working days of this week, we have a little meeting about the fine tuning of the design and layout of the new Sharepoint and which kind of features we have to added. But until this time, it was just like a drag and drop and some CSS coding, so i hope and will be better with the next steps to customize the current design and getting a new layout with some user-friendly features. The second project which i working on and which running parallel by my supervisor is a little bit more hard coding and it will be coding via Visual Basic and C#, so this one will be more amazing to working on, i hope…. But it’s very amazing atmosphere in my work placement and i have asked Kevin to do something together on the next weekend and learn more about him, but he hasn’t answered until yet. Well, i hope, i can hold this contact, because he is a very nice guy… I have him to thank for crossing the line with my community and going international, maybe he want to join this one, he really liking our background and our projects… Just take a look of our blog: click here (ready to use, style & layout are in process…)

New Tasks, New Toys

After having heard that every new switch is configured manually and that there is no default configuration template, I suggested to use Cisco Smart Install to install and configure switches automatically. Bad idea! Now the shit hit the fan. My new task is to set up a testing environment for Cisco Smart Install. To do this I got a Cisco Catalyst 3750G L3 switch as well as a Cisco Catalyst 2960:

my new toys
my new toys

After searching for the documentation and CLI commands I plugged in the 3750G’s power supply and was totally euphoric … and then bitterly disappointed. There is no iOS image on the switch. 🙁 So I have to transfer an image via console cable which takes about 4 hours. It is not easy to stay calm when you want to start your work and recognize that you have to wait for the XMODEM console transfer at approximately 873 bytes per second. 😛 As I am writing this post I am still waiting for the XMODEM transfer to finish, so I think I won’t start configuring Cisco Smart Install today. 🙁