After my Debian VM has crashed and I had told my carer that my PC was to slow for a VM, he gave me a server. Then he told me to install a Windows server 2012 and put the VBox on it in order to install my Debian there. So I installed a windows server 2012 with a Raid 1 yesterday!
Today I installed the Debian and on that machine a Zabbix Monitoring Server. That was a little bit tricky but it worked. The following days I must setup the Zabbix server and must install the Zabbix agent. That could be tricky especially under the windows machine. But I hope it will be fine soon!
And I think I will make me a ciabatta with tomato and Mozzarella today. I am sure that will be awesome! 😀
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 entranceThe 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.
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.
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.
On Friday we were the first time in our company. There we met all the employees. They are all very nice and it is a very familiar atmosphere because not more than 25 people work there. We all work there in one big office. Further they told us what kind of work we will do. We got our accounts and mail addresses and checked if everything worked.
This weekend we didn’t do anything interesting. We bought food, hung around, went into pubs and talked to the Spanish guy. And I noticed with shock that everything closes at 2 o’clock in the morning. After 2 o’clock when the bars and clubs were closed many funny drunken people were on the street of Belfast.
Here’s a picture of our street
and another from our apartment!
Today Monday was my first real working day. First I informed myself about Zabbix an open Source Monitoring tool that I later installed on their servers, but after a little while I helped the others checking whether the company’s Mobil phones have micro sim cards because they change the mobile telephone operator and get micro sim cards. That was cool because I had to go to everyone and ask them about their Company Mobile phone. That was good for me to improve my English.
Then I started to install a Linux VM to check how the Zabbix Server Work… no at first I downloaded the Debian iso and that took a while because 200MB with under 200Kb\s took a while. The use of the VM is a little creepy because the pc had just 1GB RAM and I had to close all applications to install the Linux. At the end of the day I had a running Linux and I’ll start the Server installing tomorrow.
So the first week is over. It was very interessting how fast the
time passed by.I have longer workinghours as my colleagues. Stefan and
I work from 9a.m. to 6p.m. But I like my work. Friday I got
my first little project. I work on many databases and built a report.
The report show diffrent information about the databases.
It’s based on xml. The next time I will learn how to connect the diffrent
databases for the perfect query.
Yesterday we were by Nick and Lars. They have a nice big livingroom.
At 3.am. we were driving home by taxi. I think it isn’t too
expensiv.
Today we were in the city and visit a tradional pub with live music.
It was called the old storehouse…I like this music and the feeling is so
amazing.
the first week is almost over and everything is kind of normal. You stand up, you’re going to work, you’re coming back, eat something, relax, and going to bed.
On the weekend we made a little bit of sight seeing and going to the pub’s and bar’s with our colleagues.
It is a little bit of a shame that we need to work here in Ireland 😀 We will never see all of the beautiful places in this country
but we will try our best.
My workplace are just awesome. There are one big room for the IT guys with 11 places. 6 of the guys are Spanish, 2 of them are Irish and the 2 others are from Pakistan and Brazil. It is an international and funny atmosphere. Fortunately it is easy to speak fluent english.
Well, that’s it. Im done with this week. See you next week.
it’s Sunday evening and the first week is as as good as over. It was a pretty turbulent week, a lot of things happened and there where things had to get used to, e.g. to share a small flat with 4 guys, but all in all I think I’m off to good start.
This weekend was mostly quiet, on Saturday we went shopping for food and smaller things like dishtowels. We tried out the asian supermarket around the corner where we bought 60 instant noodle packages for the small hunger in between or grim times when fresh food or frozen pizza is rare :). I also went to Waterstones, a book store which is basically the local pendant to Thalia (surreptitious advertising ftw! :p) and got myself two books to read on my way to work or days with case of bad weather.
I also went to Subway (surreptitious advertising again, whats wrong with me?:D), which by the way is at almost every corner, and bought myself a tuna sandwich and it tasted the same as in Germany (I know big surprise, duh! ;)), except for the fact that they offer other breads and coleslaw topping.
In the evening we wanted to go to another pub but were turned down quickly because two of our little group wore „sneakers“ and weren’t allowed inside, which is ridiculous, I mean it’s a pub and not high class dace temple.
With no other option left we went back to the pub we visited a few times of the week, the Elms Pub, had a few beer and went back to the apartment and had a 90’s music night.
Today we really took it easy, I was the first one to get up, again, I’ll never understand how people can sleep till noon or longer ;). We had a nice self cooked diner and just had a quiet day in, except for Daniel who had to fight with technical difficulties, first his mobile phone and then his operating system gave him trouble, but well it was at least amusing for the rest of us.
To summarize, the british people care about the shoes they wear when drinking, subway is pretty much the same, you can get everything you need at asian supermarkets and 90’s music is still bad, even after so much time.
I hope you, the readers had nice weekend too and until next time.
Today, my colleagues and I were out for a little sightseeing tour on our own.
We went to the harbour and made a lot of photos. We saw a lot of pubs and some really cool old buildings. We also took some pictures of the River Liffey and some bridges that cross it.
We also went through the St. Stevens Green near our apartment.
I was also able to take a picture of the office I work in.
At work, we are trying to customize a parking machine in that way, that people are able to pay their parking ticket with an SMS without registering somewhere.
I think that this is a pretty cool project and that I will learn a lot about electrical engineering.
On our way home, we found some curiosities. You can see one of them beneath this sentence.
We also had to make some photos of other smaller memorials or bigger statues.
The new working week begins in a way the last ended, with a beer.
I hope you excuse me that I did not tell you so many times about my week. But as you may know, the first week in a completely different and unknown Country is something very special. You have to test so much different things, have to go to so much different locations…
So… Let´s tell me something about my week:
Monday was a very special day. After a meeting with Margaret (our Coordinator for our apprenticeship here in Dublin) we (that means 14 Guys) went to the Guinness-Factory. There we were told about the procedure how to craft Guinness. After that we made our own Pint in a small Bar in the Guinness-Factory. We got a Certificate there too. Yeah, I will place it in this Blog when I have enough time. We´ll see.
Tuesday was my first Workday in Dark Rome (Yes, Rome. NOT Room 😉 ). That´s an organisator for many tours in Rome. They are all very nice people. It is not such a big Company but they are all very kind and helpful. I learned a lot of interesting things there and I like it very much. After my first day all people from the IT went to a pub. We were 6 People there and it was very nice to learn something about them.
In the next days I got a little bit around through the City. That´s very easy because I work in the centre of Dublin, directly in the City.
Yesterday I saw the Beach and the Cliffs of Howth. It´s near Dublin and I went by train with a Colleague from the Callcentre of Dark Rome. She is german too, so the language wasn´t the problem. Well, not completely. Shes from Bavaria so there were some problems of course, but not that much I have with the Irish Guys. 😉
I have to say, after a week here in Ireland I am still not completely in here. There are so many different things, the language is still a problem for me. I can write, I can read and I can talk, but it seems to be completely impossible for me to understand their accent.
What shall I say. I have still 7 weeks to improve my understanding.
