it’s the start into the sixth week and only two and a half weeks are left, to be honest I’m looking forward to be back in Germany especially to sleep alone in my own room and in my own bed.
Well on Monday I started testing Hardware that was lying around the office with the new benchtable and as it turned out most of the hardware was broken.
On Tuesday I started working on the new thin clients we got for testing purposes and I had to install the newest firmware which was a pain in the ass, because it is not possible to install the newest firmware over USB. No that would have too easy you have to do it over a special Webshare or FTP. After trying it over a web share we set up a makeshift FPT server and hey that worked, but you couldn’t just install the newest firmware, no you had to install the firmware in the order it was released, e.g. if the newest firmware is 1.3.3 and the installed firmware is 1.1.4 you have install all version between these two in the order they where released before installing the newest.
But as it was Tuesday, which meant it was crazy Tuesday at the cinemas, I went to watch the new Star Trek movie together with Robert. And the movie was good and I can say with confidence that if J.J Abrahams does as well with Star Wars as he does with Star Trek there will be awesome movies ahead 😀
it is Saturday morning and I’m preparing and my stuff for the tour to Giant’s Causeway, that’s right I’m finally going! 😛 I’ll report my experiences, supported by pictures on Sunday evening, because this entry is for the last 2 1/2 days 😀
Lets start with Wednesday afternoon, well after I got off work I went shopping in the city centre and slightly underestimated the weight of the stuff I bought with result that it took my the double amount of time to get home than it took me to get there and a stiff neck next morning.
Thursday was, aside from the stiff neck, a pretty quit day. We got our delivery from Amazon including the new bench table I was telling you about in one of my last entries. So I had the pleasure of assembling the case and putting the hardware into/onto it and installing the operating system. But the operating system turned out is confused, because it detects 2 displays where is only one 😀 quit a mystery and I haven’t figured out yet what is causing this problem.
This brings me to Friday. Robin picked me up at 9 and we went to Armagh to visit the Armagh County Museum. Of course we didn’t went there for pleasure there was work to be done. This work included installing a new HDD and restoring the data from the old HDD onto it, replacing an old printer with the printer I prepared last week and last but not least to install the new DrayTek router and establish the VPN connection to Cultra Manor…oh and we had to install a wireless access point because they had no wireless access until now.
At the end of the day we accomplished all of our tasks except for installing the DrayTek. The Problem is that the current router is using an option to tunnel the public IP-Address of the firewall to the Internet, or something like this we are still figuring out what the company responsible for the firewall and internet setup did. And because there is no visible option on the DrayTek to achieve a similar function we couldn’t install the router without everyone behind the firewall to lose their internet connectivity.
We left the current setup in place for now and starting on Monday I’ll try to find out how to get the DrayTek working or to implement a secure VPN connection between Cultra and Armagh with the micro server as a client, instead of a Site-to-Site VPN we would have an Server-Client setup.
I wanted to take some picture of Armagh as it is a beautiful town but the weather was terrible just like the last days we had rain most the day and I wasn’t able to take pictures without risking my camera. I just hope that the weather will be better for the tour today so that I can take pictures for me to share.
Nothing really new to tell about my time here in Ireland.
At work we are still making tests with the parking machine and are fine-tuning our webpage.
On Tuesday I was visiting a physiotherapist for a massage to get the tension out of my back. Also I hoped that the numbness of my fingers would go away. It didn’t but it got better.
Yesterday I tried to cook something and, for those who now my cooking skills, it was a success.
It tasted awesome and I am kind of proud of it and myself.
first of I’m sorry that I couldn’t update the update the Blog as planned on Friday & yesterday, Sunday, evening. The reason for that is our network, somehow every weekend or network begins to act up and then it’s no longer possible to access the Internet, well at least not entirely because sometimes its possible to access websites saved in your DNS cache but even that is rare. The main problem is that some idiot changes the configuration of the gateway for the whole network, mind you all apartments are going through the same gateway, and resets the changes we made last weekend to get it running again and we are not able to access the gateway at the moment. As a result we have DHCP leases with the duration of „forever“ and duplicated addresses, I’m only able to write this blog entry because there is no one on the network so early in the morning (most people are sleeping till noon).
To come to the point, this point entry will sum up my experiences for the rest of the last week and I will continue my normal blogging cycle.
Alright lets get started!
On Wednesday I was visited by Mrs. Neumann, my supervisor at the Max-Planck Institution, and Mr. Bavar, the supervisor for the AFIB, to check how I’m doing.
We had a little chat and I showed them my workplace, told them about the work I do at the museum and they got to meet my colleagues. As they had a tight schedule they couldn’t stay long and left after 20 minutes to visit my classmate Henrik and our accommodation.
Groupshot of Mrs. Neumann, Mr. Flanagan and me
The rest of the day I spent with writing the documentation for the DrayTek routers I’m installing and started to clean up my desk in preparation for the arrival of the bench table we ordered.
And for the people who don’t know what bench table is I’ll give a short explanation, the rest of you can skip to the next paragraph.
A bench table is basically a computer case for testing purposes, it allows the user to access and exchange parts easily without taking out other parts. They decided to buy one after I pointed out that it would be easier to test hardware for defects at a bench table then assembling a new test PC every time they want to test a graphics card.
On Thursday I was tasked with the problem to find out how to install the Microsoft System Center Client software on a Mac client. Well I found out what the necessary requirements are but I will have to work my way through the necessary deployment of certificates and distribution points, I think it could take a while till I fully understand how to get things running.
The next day I went to work at Ulster Museum again where I helped Graham and Robin to take down the screen in the lecture hall, after the screen was down we had to calibrate the colors for the projector, because now it’s projecting right at the wall, and adjust the spotlights for the stage so that they don’t throw shadows. It was quit fun because we got to toy around with the new A/V (audio & video) rack the installed, which meant we inserted a Blu-ray disk and watched videos on YouTube, but all in the name of calibration of course 😛
On Friday evening we had a LAN Party again but I went to bed early because we planed to hike up to Belfast Castle and from there up Cave Hill.
The next day I knew the plans have been cancelled because most of them went to bed between 2 or 3 and they wouldn’t be up till noon.
But after I got up at 8 and saw that the weather looked really nice I decided to go alone and started my hike at 9:30 after I packed my bag with water, cereal bars and of course my camera.
I walked past City Hall, of which I took pictures but they were deleted because of foobar (unknown reason), through the city centre, took a left at St. Annes’s Cathedral, took a right at Carlisle Circus and walked straight down Antrim Road until I reached the entrance to Cave Hill Park after a 90 minutes walk.
Halfway there
Entrance gate Cave Hill park
From there I took the path that lead me to Belfast Castle, a truly wonderful building with a neat little park/garden and an incredible view over Belfast.
Backside of Belfast Castle
At the castle I took my first break and ate breakfast, sandwiches bought at Tesco on my way through city centre, and enjoyed the view over Belfast from a bench in the park. Shortly after that I started my ascension to the peak of Cave Hill.
At first I walked through the forest surrounding the foot of Cave Hill and followed the Cave Hill trail marked by stones along the way.
Helpful little helpers
Path trough the woods
When I broke through the forest line and looked up the step face of Cave Hill it was truly breathtaking. I took a short break to enjoy the view and to eat a cereal bar.
Indescribable with words
Along the way I found out why Cave Hill is called Cave Hill, because of the caves, big surprise I know :D, there are five caves of unnatural origin in Cave Hill, that’s what Wikipedia says but I only found one.
Entrance to one the name giving caves
Anyway following the path leading to the top I enjoyed a growing panorama spanning all of Belfast, Belfast’s surroundings and even a glimpse of Scotland beyond the sea in the distance.
great view isn't it?
After around 90 minutes of hiking I arrived at the top of Cave Hill and was almost blown away the strong winds, that suddenly appeared because the step side of the mountain shielded me all the way up.
Arriving at the top I made my way to McArts Fort, the point on Cave Hill with probably the best view, there I met Andrea and Joanna, two really nice girls from Switzerland.
View at McArts Fort
Me at McArts Fort
We made our way back down on the other side of Cave Hill, going around the old quarry and arriving back at Belfast Castle. On our way down I was attacked by an angry bush with thorns, I its possible that I walked into it, and almost slipped on one of the steeper parts on the way. At the castle we went into the cafe in the cellar of the castle and had a tea and sandwiches and talked about our experiences in UK and Ireland. I was telling them about Belfast, Joanna told me about her stay in Scotland and Andrea about her stay in Galway. After that we took the bus back to the city centre and parted ways.
I was home around 4:30pm and went straight into the shower to relax and clean up and went to Lavery’s Bar in the evening to get a pint of Guinness and enjoy the atmosphere.
Yesterday I woke up with aching leg muscles and a stiff back, the former is a result of the hike the latter is caused by a to soft mattress.
After breakfast I waited for the rest to get up and we didn’t leave the apartment after that, with the exception of going to a shop to get whipped cream for the cheese noodles we had, they were yummy I tell you 😀
We mostly played old video games against each other, e.g. Command & Conquer Red Alert 2, CS 1.5, but the setup and configuration for everyone took longer than we hoped for.
Alright I think that’s enough for the moment and I thank everyone who has read up to this point. I hope all of you had a nice weekend.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Today Steve and I went out into a pub to have a beer and something to eat.
Steve ordered “Bangers & Mash” and I ordered some “Chilli Beef Nachos”.
It was awesome. I never ate such good Nachos.
Before...... and after.
At work, we are trying to implement Drupal (a Content Management System) into our workflow. This should save us some time because we don’t need to create so much from scratch.
Our plans for the weekend are still the same. We still want to visit the Temple Bar District.
That’s all folks. I think I’ll pass my next entry at the weekend so that I have more time to see and experience something.
Now we have about one and a half weeks behind us and there is one thing I recognized just today, the changes in the weather.
I don’t know how to explain it, because it is totally weird. When we were visiting the Guinness Storehouse on Monday last week, I figured out that the wind, despite the normal temperatures, could be terrible.
But since today afternoon I know for sure. It is like a hurricane just as I am writing these letters. For me as a smoker that is not allowed to smoke inside it is like a punishment.
It’s like the wind wants to annoy me. Besides that, it is not really possible to walk outside without some protective walls because the wind will play with you and push you around.
If you ignore the wind (if possible) the weather is pretty fine, it’s not too cold or too warm.
At work it is going to become more IT related. I am now responsible (together with a colleague) to write some PHP functions for our reporting software and later I may be able to finally use some of my networking skills when we are testing the system on the streets.
This time there are no pictures that I could come up with. We didn’t go out the last couple of days. Maybe at the weekend, when there is more time to go out. But when we do, we will try to take a look at the Temple Bar District. Maybe we find some interesting spots and/or people.
