Tag: 16. April 2013

A trip to the Village

Hello everyone,

as promised in one of my other entries here is Tuesdays Blog entry.

Yesterday, so Monday, I met with Keith at Ulster Museum, which is only a 10 minutes walk, to install 2 new UPS units into the local wiring center. But the whole process is harder then it seems, first there is thing with installing the support bars, which will support the weight of around 80-90 Kg per Unit. These things gave me more trouble then anything else this day because it’s a real hassle to install these things without hurting yourself or loosing half of the included installation material.
Installing the units into the wiring cabinets was the less complicated part, if you ignore the weight ;), but  wouldn’t it be boring if it ends there? 😀

Wiring and setting up the first unit was fairly easy, it’s basically just there to ensure that the servers for Window of the World (WoW in short :D) are backed up in case of a power outage. The second USP was supposed to relieve the HP USP from its duties, which turned out to be a miscommunication between us (Keith & me) and guys up in Cultra.
As the old USP was supporting the backup servers we made sure that all secondary power was coming from one of the power blocks and every connection to the USP was interrupted, or so we thought.
After making sure that every thing was ready to to unplug the USP I pulled the power cord I pulled the plug and silence, I just killed the backup servers and 2 SAS arrays. As it turns out everything in this cabinet was running over this USP, including the power blocks 🙁 and the old USP wasn’t supposed to be replaced but instead supported by the new USP.
After getting our facts straight we rewired everything made sure that servers and all where running on both USPs and the day was over 🙂

I should mention that shutting down the servers has not caused any damage or harm to any innocent information units stored.

Today i was working back at Cultra and went up to Cultra Manor to help Graham with a ticket, shortly after that we went up to the village.
The village is part of the Folk Museum and was dissembled, at a place which name I have forgotten :P, and rebuild back at Cultra.
Again I help Graham with a few technical problems at the offices in the village, e.g. a printer which had to be reconfigured and it took us about an hour to fix the problem (printers a scheme by the devil to torture us I tell you ;))
The village is really beautiful place, it has old candy store, where you can buy actual candy (yay :D), a Post office, a Bank, a Cinema etc. Of course most of these things are just show cases but it’s still pretty impressive, there is even something like a hostel where school classes can spend the night.

A view at the village entrance
The old projector on display in the Cinema

 

And just to give you an impression of the weather we have here:

View from the train at the bay

I hope everyone of you, my readers, had a nice start into the week and I hope to write you more on Thursday.

 

Yours sincerely,

Tobaias

 

 

 

 

everyday life sais „hello“

Today is the second day of a new week and I think it is like in Berlin.
I go to work and after the work I do a little bit of sport. After this
I cook.
Therefor we have healthy eating 😉


At my work I have a new project. It includes SMTP. 😀
Sadly we don’t have much time. Also we’ll visit ireland and the city
at the weekend. Than my report will be a little bit more spicy.

It’s very sad that we have so less time to visit the country.

 

see you later

#4 – My first workday

Greetings everyone,

today I will tell you a bit about my first workday. Of course this will be split into the parts of the journey to the workplace, the day itself as well as the way home.

The journey towards

Luckily we were given some advice on how to get there by Margaret on our firstmeeting.

We were supposed to go by buslane 4 or 13 which happen to stop at the same busstop near our hostel. Erik and I took the next bus that appeared which has been the lane 13. On the bus we found our seating upstairs just at the backend. We later understood that this was a bad choice. We were not able to see which busstops we were at, so we were getting quite anxious about when to get off the bus. Erik was constantly checking his smartphone so eventually we where able to get off at the correct busstop after we drove about 45 minutes (this was actually a long trip compared to our class-mates). At the busstop we looked around. We where quite confused as this busstop could never be correct even though Eriks phone said so. There was a lot of nothing around, just a lot of space on our side, decorated with a lot of garbage. On the other side of the street we saw a few buildings. This had to be our direction.

We found a few Blocks which had to be our workingplace. The next task would be to find the right ones. Erik had it easy. His company was listed at one of the signs in front of the blocks. My company was not. I had to ask someone who came by and he actually had to go into the same building as I.

DCNetworks

I entered the buerau and was surprised that everyone actually knew that I  would appear. After a nice and warm greeting I got to know my guide or mentor (James). He showed me around and gave me my first task – setting up my workplace. After I did that suprisingly well he showed me how the backups – which they do for their clients – work. He gave me the task to check the backups that failed and told me I will do that now every morning. My second task is to simply monitor my co-workers.

The journey home

After I managed to get the day by I left with my last co-workers and picked up Erik. We headed to the place we got off the bus in the first place and looked for our busstation. The one we found was only for lane 4. This somehow confused us, as both lanes stopped at the same stop when we went towards this place. When the bus arrived and we hopped on we had the same trouble as we had on our way to work. „Were the hell are we supposed to get off this time?“ Of course we saw our busstation too late and looked quite stupid as it passed by. We then got off one busstation later and luckily we found out that our way was not much further than from the correct busstop.

We still got home quite late (about 7 p.m.) and the last things to do were a bit householding and dinner. After that we hang around a bit longer until we finally went to bed to do about the same thing again next day.

THE END

Well thats it for my first working day. Next time will go into a bit more of a detail about our routes from and to work as well as our points of orientation. Additionally I will talk a bit more about my actual tasks at DCNetworks.

See you then!

— TO BE CONTINUED —