Autor: Tobias Nieresel

Start in Week #4

Hello everyone,

I’m sorry for the delay but I was too lazy yesterday evening to write my blog entry, that’s why I’m doing it right now.

All in all the last two days have been really quiet, on Monday I was tasked with testing hardware that was lying around if it was still usable and had to tinker around a bit with the silent installation of my Adobe Reader installation package.
Yesterday I had to exchange the cooler mount in an old NEC computer, which was broken and replaced the thermal paste. Furthermore I got the software of an old Laptop up to date, which basically meant to install the newest patches, newer versions of the standard software, e.g. CCleaner, MS Office 2010 and update the drivers, if there were any new drivers which wasn’t the case.

Yesterday was crazy Tuesday at most cinemas, so Hendrik, Robert and I took this opportunity to watch the new Iron Man 3 movie. Because I knew from my colleagues that the cinema would be really busy on Tuesdays I bought the tickets for Hendrik and me on my way back from work.
The movie started at 20:20 and my plan was to leave the apartment at 19:45 but after I heard that Robert wanted to accompany us we left at 19:30 and it was the right decision because the screening was sold out shortly after.
After we bought Roberts tickets we had another 30 minutes until the movie started so we went into the nearest pub and got ourselves a Guinness, respectively a cider for Robert and went back to the cinema around 8:00 because we wanted to get good seats as it was first come first.
Before we went into the screening room I bought myself a big coke, which turned out to be a big mistake because I had to go to the toilet halfway through the movie but didn’t want to leave so I had to hold it in.
We left the cinema at around 23:15 and went straight home where I took a shower and fell into bed. And I forgot to mention I only paid 5.80£ (~6.90€) for the whole experience, I never paid less for movie visit 😀
Oh, and before some asks, the movie was awesome, but I’m not really objective because I love Marvell 😛 but if you’ve seen the first 2 movies and liked them you will definitely like part 3, further more Ben Kingsley was just awesome as the Mandarin.

That’s it for the moment, thanks for reading!

 

Yours sincerely,
Tobias

End of Week #3

Hello everyone,

it’s Sunday evening (more like night) and you what that means. Correct new blog entry! 😀

In my last entry I wrote that I would be driving to Armagh with Robin, little misunderstanding on my part, Robin told me we were going to Omagh  and just understood Armagh (because of his accent they sound exactly the same) , but I will be going to Armagh at some point during the next weeks. Robin picked me up near the Botanic Gardens and took the opportunity to take a look around the park and it’s really really beautiful.

Tropical House, Botanic Gardens

 

The museum in Omagh is the Ulster American Folk Park, which displays the lifestyle of the irish people before they went to America and after they arrived there.
For this purpose the build up typical living houses workshops and everything, in most of the rebuild workshops they demonstrations and they have actors in many of the old buildings who tell the visitors of „their“ situation. All in all very neat but I haven’t had much time to look around because a) it was raining really hard most of the time and b) I had work to do…obviously  :P.

Entrance to the new world @ Ulster American Folk Park

 

The main reason we went to Omagh is to install a new server which is acting as new domain controller with full replication of the one that is already running, because the one currently hosting the AD-service is really old and if that one fails (possibly in the near future) it gets thrown out and the new one will take over.
Furthermore we had to install a new access point and I was to set up a new router but I wasn’t able to do this because the IPS login credentials were missing, which means I will have to do this later. I hope to use this opportunity to take more pictures and to get a better look at everything.
Another good thing about this day was that I got to see more of the irish countryside and I’m always baffled by the extreme difference between Germany and Ireland.

No double rainbow and no pot of gold :(
Raibow on the way back to Belfast

 

And on the weekend we didn’t get the chance to go to Donard Park, mostly because the weather report said we would have bad weather which turned out to be quit fine (except for the wind), so instead of going to Donard Park we had a third nice weekend in Belfast’s Queensquarter.

On Saturday we had a big party in the Building because Rubén was celebrating his birthday, he is one of our spanish neighbors upstairs, and the same time the guys in the apartment below us had another party.
Today I was the first one to get up, again, and started to clean the kitchen/living room because it was kinda filthy 😀 After the rest got up and had Breakfast we went shopping again and had a small but funny LAN-Party.
Next weekend the guys and me are going to rent a car and go on our 3 day trip to the Giant’s Causeway and surroundings, we are all really excited and Robin will help with plotting the route we should take to get the most of our trip.

That’s it for the moment, I hope all of you had a nice weekend.

Yours sincerely,

Tobias

Middle of Week #3

Hello everyone,

the last two days have been really tiring, because we started testing the first distribution and remote installation system for the Staff-PCs. Up until now every PC was installed manually but with the rising count of workstations and Laptops my colleagues decided to implement the distribution of Windows over the network.
And my job in the last two days was to assist Graham with the testing of the system. For this purpose we occupied the training room at Cultra Manor and set up 15 new Office clients and 12 new Laptops.

Cultra Manor

 

In the end we had only a half remote installation, which meant we had to install most of the software and drivers manual and cost us a lot of time (10 hours on both days) but we got the Job done and the clients are ready to be handed over to their new users. But we will try to optimize the procedure and reduce the manual configuration of the clients to a minimum.

only took the picture because I played around with my camera :D
The new laptop clients

 

In addition to the work at the clients I installed the VPN-router yesterday and it works like a charm, we had to do a little research to find out that the ISP is using VLAN insertion for the dial up connection.
Tomorrow I will drive to Armagh with Robin to install the counterpart for the router in Cultra and set up the VPN connection and probably help Robin with a few other issues that he has to take care of. I hope to take a few nice pictures of Armagh as I will not have the chance to go there that often, mainly because it takes about 90 minutes by car to reach it.

Read you on Sunday, and to show you how beautiful my workplace is, here is a picture taken from maybe one of the highest points at the Folk Museum.

A view upon Cutra Manor and beyond

 

Yours sincerly,

Tobias

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)

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

 

Changing Weather

Hello everyone,

this will be short a pretty short entry (your thoughts: „As if your other entries would have been any longer!“), because  the last two days where more or less quiet.
Yesterday I worked at a little project to test a possible implementation of Gallery Project, a open source picture database. The whole project started because a user was complaining about how it’s hard to find  a suitable picture for whatever project he was working on.
For this a installed a Debian on a virtual machine and set up the web server, other necessary packages and Gallery Project, which is working just fine, and I’m currently toying around with it to asses it’s usability. Besides this small project I help my colleagues  where ever I can and I’m learning something new.

My Desk at Cultra

But besides work it’s the weather that gets me pretty worked up (pun intended? maybe ;)). It’s really hard to predict the weather here but in general you can be sure that at some point it’s going to rain. Yesterday morning it looked like it’s going to be a fine day, the sun was shining and as soon as I was about to leave the apartment it started to rain as if all gates have broken loose, but I’m sure I’m in for more :D. The result was that I arrived at worked drenched from head to toe, I’m glad that my jacket kept my shirt dry or else I would be lying in bed with a cold.
And today started gray and turned out pretty nice, the sun was shining most of the day and it only rained a few times in between.

A Storm approaching?

 

That’s it for today (I told you it would be short), tomorrow I will be working at the Ulster Museum again, I’m curios what quests await me there.

Yours sincerely

Tobias

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

 

 

 

 

A few things I noticed

Hello everyone,

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.

Yours sincerely,

Tobias

The first few days at the Museum

Hello <insert your name here>,

it is now Friday evening and the first days of work at the NMNI (National Museums of Norther Ireland) are over. As most of you can probably guess I am working in the IT-Department of the NMNI which only consists of Gordon, Robin, Graham and Keith, who only does audio and video related work.

Where to now?

My first thought, when I heard I was going to work at a Museum, was <sarcasm>“Great working at the Museum can only mean first level support.“</sarcasm> but as it turns out a was so far off. The thing is the IT-Department is responsible for everything inside the NMNI which is , even if it is only remotely, related to Computers, Networks, Server and etc.

Cute IT deparment, isn't it?

The department is situated in Cultra, which is located near Hollywood (yes there is a town outside Belfast called Hollywood ;)), and I have to take the train to work. It is a really convenient way to work, I get on the train at Botanic (5 minute walk from the apartment) and get of at Cultra.

Platformview from Botnic railroad station.

 

On Tuesday I had my first workday which basically meant to be introduced to everyone, setting up my work place and getting to know the place and everything. On Wednesday and Thursday I tried to get hang of how things work and trying to understand the infrastructure of the NMNI. Besides that I got to work with DrayTek SOHO VPN-routers which I will implement in the following few weeks, the goal is to achieve a VPN connection between Cultra and Armagh (70 miles outside of Belfast).
Today I met with Graham and worked at the Ulster Museum until noon because we some had some tickets to attend to, e.g some hotdesk PCs weren’t supposed to be working (as it turned out they worked perfectly fine).  After that we went back to Cultra and had to sit out the 2 hour server shutdown because of maintenance at the SAN arrays.

All in all it is a I can say I got lucky with my placement, I really like the familiar atmosphere and that my workplace is surrounded by green is a nice bonus.

And if someone is curios the weather in Belfast is a nice british grey with hints of rain 😉 And if you will excuse me now I have a beer to attend to 😀

 

Yours sincerely

Tobias

P.S I will try to post new blog entries every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, if anyone cares ;p

A small sign of spring 😀

Of frozen pizza and orange juice or the search for Lidl

It is now the third day in Belfast and I have, more or less, settled in. The main goal of the last two days was to secure our (our ,that is my flatmates and me) main supply of food, water and other things to secure our survival in this foreign country.
For this we went on the quest to find the holy halls of Lidl, where treasure of affordable prices where promised by our predecessors. And after Minutes of consulting the holy institution  of Google Maps© we found a Lidl and went on a journey which would make Bilbo Baggins proud.
After a hellish 2,6 miles of road and evading cars, because we where looking in the wrong direction (left-hand driving is so wrong on so many levels ;)) , we arrived at our destination with a yellow sun of Lidl rising before us.
We ventured into the holy halls of Lidl and returned with precious treasure containing water, frozen pizza (the best friend of every humble man), bread, cereals (the breakfast of true man) and other small items of importance, like shaving cream.
Our return trip took longer than expected, mainly because we did not account for the additional weight of our loot, and the 2,6 miles back felt more like 5 miles.
But at the end of the day our small Party was victorious and was rewarded with warm pizza, a cold cola and a good conversation over a shared meal.
I hope you enjoyed my creative writing style, because the truth is not much has happened until now.
I arrived in Belfast, had a little look around the neighborhood and went shopping the next day for food and supplies. In the evening we went to the local pub and had a Guinness, which tastes way better here than in Germany by the way.
Today we had meeting at RMS Tenon for a small introduction and going over some details for my/our stay in Belfast, after that we had a small walk around the city center and bought ourselves some simcards.
Tomorrow I will be introduced to my workplace, I am very excited because I still do not know what to expect.

Read you soon

Yours sincerely

Tobias

 

P.S.

Please excuse the lack of Pictures but I will upload some pictures with my next entry.