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!
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
