Monat: April 2013

Another day!

And the beautiful weather from Monday is over, at least it was yesterday and today. But my handy app says that the sun will shine again, even if it will only be 9 degrees. Today was a grey day and in the morning we had typical drizzle.

In the following day, there seem to be some events in Belfast. I think there is a marathon and the 400 years Belfast celebration! Probably they installed a lot of Mobil cameras for that occasion in Belfast.

Yesterday and today I have been working a lot on my Zabbix documentation and have fought with the items in Zabbix. I’ve got the feeling as if they do not like me. Furthermore I helped the guys one time more with some Mobil phone inventory.

This evening I requested my extended dates on Facebook and two hours later I got a mail with a download link over 76kb. I checked it out end saw that they lost so many thinks that I now requested all data over an E-Mail! I´m interested in what I get then but I think it will take a while!

I hope you have a great time back home.

You’ll hear from me again in two days. 🙂

 

Henrik

New week, old things

Dear Reader,

it’s our third week here in Ireland and it becomes complete normal for me to speak in fluent English. Of course there are still a lot of small mistakes but I speak fluent with my colleagues and that’s the most important thing in my opinion. And I am really thankful for getting this work experience! I will definitely profit from this for the rest of my life.

Today we had a little team meeting and talk about the stuff we should do in the next few days. A few backup’s from our local developer machines and finish the mailmigartion to exchange 2010 (and than on 2013). After the mailmigration is done I need to find and configure a program that check the licenses of our windows PC’s in the network.  My biggest problem is the fact that we don’t have that much money so I need to try different freeware and trial solutions and all of them are as good as everything you got for free 😀

To bring this post to an end, let’s stay on the theme „for free“: the hot water heater in our sleeping room makes noises up to 80 dB. That’s like a lawn Mower, an accelerating car or a machine that blows the leaves from the street. But the highly insulating wooden door from our wardrobe safe us. If we close the door… we only have 75 dB 🙂
See you and have a nice day… and don’t worry, me and my colleagues are okay. We manage that stuff and as long as we can laugh together everything is fine 😉 The next post will be longer and with some photos again.

Alexander

 

Start into week #3

Good news everyone,

as I mentioned in my previous blog entry we had to wait for the correct iSCSI controller, which was to be delivered on Monday and guess what…it did and this time it was the correct one 😀
Shortly after delivery the HP technician arrived and installed the controller and took approximately only 5 minutes to install it but at least 45 minutes until the controller had configured itself and started operating, which means I we stood in front a laptop and started at the screen occasionally refreshing the configuration page.
After ensuring that the controller was running properly Graham and me went back to Cultra (I should have mentioned that I met with Graham at the Ulster Museum) and I started working at my Gallery Project project and tried to help a colleague with a problem, the emphasis lies on tried.
She reported a problem with the start up of a program which takes like 5 minutes and longer to load. The first thing I checked was the hard disk drive (HDD) with a diagnostics tool (big shout to HDtune) which showed some unsettling results.
From this result i concluded that the long load time is due to an impending HDD failure, so exchanged the HDD with a new one and cloned the old System onto the new drive.
But after that the problem wasn’t resolved so I exchanged the RAM with the same result and with that I was at a loss and I’m now suspecting the connection between the client and the server but this will be problematic to prove, seeing that no other client has this problem.

Today I worked most of the time at Cultra Manor, where a new training center is installed respectively extended, I upgraded the software on the existing clients and setup a few temporal environment with the new clients to test the new remote installation via Microsoft System Center 2012.
In addition to this I started to install the first VPN-router in the Manor which I will complete tomorrow because I forgot to pack a mini switch 😛
but it basically plug & play tomorrow as I have completed most of the configuration today.

And I have bad news regarding my trip to Donard park is most likely to get cancelled because the forecast for this weekend is frosty but we are hoping that this will turn around in the next days, if not there is always the next weekend.

I leave you with this and hope you had a good start into the week.

Yours sincerely,

Tobias

P.S. Starting this post I will use a new title pattern so you can easily identify of what part of the week I write about and the week number.
(But mostly because I’m to lazy to come up with a witty/funny/creative title for every post)

It’s Run

(please read this entry as if it was posted yesterday.):P

 

Good news my Zabbix server is running first, the agent sent data to the server and I can monitor the first Servers.

But now I must configure all graphics, applications and items. And that’s a lot of work. At the moment I don’t have all items in the list that I need. As an example, I miss CPU and network utilization and currently they do not want to be integrated.

The graphics are now a little tricky because I must configure it so that you can understand it at first glance.

That’s my work desk a little bit messy but that happens when you work!

Today was a very lovely day in Belfast as you can see. We had a very sunny day and it was relatively moderately warm, just a little bit windy. I hope that the next days will be similarly well, but I don’t think so because it’s Northern Ireland.

Normaly Day in 3 Week

At Monday at work I watched library videos from pluralsight, it’s an internet learning
Platform to the topic WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) basics.
It isn’t an easy task to learn WCF programming in Visual Studio 2010.
But it is better than nothing.   After 3 hours watching videos and the lunch I created a
console.application and wcf-service-library with the simple test
“helloworld“. After work I cooked for my colleagues and me. The evening wasn’t so long for me, because I have to cure my cold.

Today was a normaly workday. I watched the other videos about my project. The topics are as interesting as hard. Because the videos are in a good english
I learn a lot and understand the most even if I watch the videos only once.
After a hard day, Richard and I resolved some issues in a report.

Now we watch the cheampions leage and cook our dinner.

See you later

The dark side…

Dear Reader,

the weekend was as short as the weekend before. On Friday we were very tired, on Saturday we sleep until 3pm and at the evening we met our colleagues. Than we sleep again until 3pm on Sunday and the weekend is over.

I can’t show you any photos of that because it would ruin your view on our group and hopefully nobody is disappointed about that. But these evenings are a good way to hear something about the others and their working places.
Of course I read a lot Blogs and Blogpost’s but it’s way better to hear it directly and especially the story’s from Erik and Stefan are very funny every time. At this point: Greetings to them! Our apartment now not only sucks because it’s a ruin but also because we don’t clean it for a while. We will manage it today… maybe tomorrow 😀 *If we wait 2 weeks the food maybe will move itself to the garbage…* that’s an option but i think not a good one. No I’m just joking 😉 It’s a normal chaos for an apartment with 4 guys in it.

(of course we clean that on the same evening)
(of course we clean that on the same evening)

So that’s it for today. Please don’t take my Post to serious 😉

See you next time,

Alexander

2 weeks and counting

Hello everyone,

it’s Sunday evening, again, and the second week in Belfast is over.

On Friday I worked at the Ulster Museum again but this time it was very slow day because at first we, Graham and me, had to wait for the delivery  of the new iSCSI controller for the backup system. After the arrival of the part at half past 10, not half past 9 as promised, we had to wait another 45 minutes for the HP technician responsible for installing the controller. And as it turned out the controller was the wrong one, so we had to wait another 90 minutes in which the technician tried to find out if the correct controller was available, which it wasn’t. In the end the controller has to be „imported“ from Prague and is to arrive on Monday.
In between I took care of a few tickets at the Ulster Museum e.g. I installed Software for a user via remote support and deleted user accounts for employees whom have left the NMNI.

In the evening we, my flatmates and me,  went to a pub with our spanish upstairs neighbors but I went home early, around 12, because I wasn’t feeling well.

Yesterday we did our weekly shopping and replenished our food supplies, we bought cheese, cereals and other necessities, in addation I finally found some chai tea, of which I’m currently enjoying a cup.  The rest of the day was spent in peace, which means we all did our own stuff and talked about what we want to do next weekend, as of now we want to take a hike at Donard park near Newcastle.

Today we went back to the city center for smaller errands, I bought myself a new belt and postcards for my family. While on our small trip we found some cheap meat and finally had decent self made meal, also we vacuumed and wiped the floor in our apartment.

To summarize our weekend we can use one word….quiet. I hope to upload some pictures of Donard park next weekend, so you have something to look forward to.

 

Yours sincerely,

Tobias

 

Weekend

On Friday we had a Party Day, friday evening after work we went to a pub with a dance floor upstairs. With us were two guys who flew with us. They are draftsmen from the Oszimt. The four Spanish guys who are living above us and two of the other computer scientists from the other apartment went with us. That was a very funny evening. But… I´m sorry for that but the Irish people are not the best dancers and unfortunately most girls are really not the prettiest. It is funny to watch them because the more they drink the funnier it is. As an example…One of my colleagues here lost his phone and an Irish girl stole his tiger costume tail. Yes that was our amusing Friday.

On Saturday I slept until 15 o’clock. Then after breakfast I took a shower and then we bought food. We had a very relaxed evening.

Today I stood up earlier 😀 After eating breakfast and helping my girlfriend with a computer problem I went jogging along a river which was very nice but pretty exhausting. Then we cleaned our apartment and now I write this blog. After that I will make myself something to eat.

First night out…

Hi folks, it’s me again.

 

Yesterday, we went to a laundrette to have our laundry cleaned. That was necessary because of the bad laundry machines in our apartments.

 

Later, Alex and I went out to take a look at Dublin at night.

We saw a lot of people on their way to get in a club or a pub so we decided to go to our colleagues Erik and Stefan.

After we arrived, we took a look at their apartment and compared it to our apartment. Their apartment has the advantage that their hot water heater is not in one of the bedrooms so everyone can sleep well.

After the comparison we settled down and had a couple of drinks.

 

The evening was pretty funny and we talked a lot about Ireland itself and about our working places and what we are doing right now at work.

 

I am sorry to tell that there are no pictures of our journey because I forgot my camera.

 

That’s all for today. The next Blog entry will come in a couple of days I think.

 

See you soon.

Markus

Trim Castle and the propably oldest cemetery of mankind

Hi,

as I told you the day before yesterday I was on a trip about the old celtic culture in Ireland on saturday.

So my day started at 6 am to stand up early and the joy to realise again the incredible cool public transport here in Dublin. I looked on my official App when the bus is arriving so I could go out and wait just a few seconds for it. My App told me, that the bus arrives in nearly 20 minutes. After 5 minutes I watched out of my window and saw my bus passing by… The next look on my app told me, that I have to wait another 40 minutes. Really. This is the last thing I want to have on a saturday morning.

However, I arrived on time and the tour started.

Our first station was the Hill of Tara with a nearby standing old Church. I didn´t get the whole story about this location, but I understood that it was very bloody. The typical irish history.

After this awesome location we drove to Trim Castle. The biggest Castle in Ireland is now a very tall Ruin with a big Tower inside. Some scenes of the film Braveheart were taken here (god damn, I real need the Camera from my colleague! She made really good photos).

We took the bus to arrive some minutes later at the propably oldest cemetery of mankind and definetly the oldest in Ireland. It is called Lough Crew. Really. I will stop here and hope to give you all the pictures in the next days!

 

Cu, Lars