Yesterday one of our spanish neighbours was celebrating is 30th birtday and we all gathered in his apartment to have a nice cup of hot tea combined with tradiontal spanish food which was made really well made and was delicious. After having long lasting discussion about the culuture differences and the ongoing developemnt in our home countries we went to a local pub which also a kind of gambling center. We had an awesome time everyone was really friendly and we definitley made some new friends here. Today I took the cab to the International Airport of Belfast setting up my contract with the car rental which in the end was refused due my lack of a Visa card. Still I wasn’t going to give up and I made a new appointment for tommorow, this time equipped with a Visa card. Our plan is to follow up the coast and see all the nice places we already heared about. Finally we are going to wittness the true nature of the green country.
Monat: Mai 2014
Lync Server 2013 Setup
Last week I had the task to setup a Lync server on our Hyper-V cluster. Its a bit hard do work on everything without administrator passwords because I need Amit to login everything. But besides this the installation had some problems because some services don`t start and the installer can`t install features itself. I got quite far. But before we can start the installation of the service itself we have to install certificates. Oddly there was a warning if we install one of the certificates that it could create errors on out exchange and sharepoint. So we have to clear that issue with the head system engineer.
Site surveys and In-building wireless
On Thursday a co-worker and I went to Micro Focus to do a site survey to see if its possible to put in our lights without any problems and to see what we have to buy to make it possible.
After that I took a look at our pilot project in the Derry City Council to see if we still have any motion detection at times where no one is in.
On Friday I prepared a bit for the CCNA NetRiders next Wednesday. In the Afternoon I did a bit of research for In-building Wireless for a project that we’re working on.
the week in total
Hello everyone,
now we finished the short week of work because monday was a bank holiday and most of us had free time.
This week was exhausting for me but it still makes fun since the workmates are very nice.
At Wednesday I started to backup a fileserver to for backing up 400 GB. Until now only 180GB are transfered because the data is transfered over a WAN connecting. The system needs to be shut down so the data needs to be backupped.I started to write a short documentation about my project so my colleagues know what data is outsourced.
And like every friday there are a typical breakfast in the cantine which consits of beans soda, bread potato bread and sausages, it tastes really good and it is very cheap.
testing environment
After learning a bit more about Java Script I got in a meeting a so called „knowledge share“ which was really interesting to witness. I got introduced to some new features and side projects which are running in the background and I wasn´t aware of. My task for the week was to write a little script which is going to test some new implementations written by a colleague of mine. This is going to test wheather the text to speech enginge is recognizing our written code including audio feedback which is really usefull to have. I am really looking forward to the weekend as there is an awfull lot happening but more about that soon!
The replacement of a smart array controller
Hi there!
Yap, yesterday was again a day of field work. Rick and I went to Antrim yesterday, to replace a smart array controller of an HP MSA array system. Antrim is one side of our storage cluster, so the absolute functionality is very important. The controller itselfs is just the size of a big book, but nonetheless the price is very high, so take care! Today I’ve studied some IPv6 configurations for our next Cisco exam and activated a few Windows OS’s of PACS computers. They are called NIPACS here, by the way. („NI“ stands for Northern Ireland) As far as I am informed our dear colleage Toni pays us a visit this weekend and that’s fitting well, because we cleaned our flat yesterday, or at least the floor, so we can show now, how tidy we are. 😎 No, seriously, actually we wanted to clean the floor, because Martin dropped… hmm, I don’t know, it’s been so long that I’ve forgotten what. Well, at least he finally cleaned it up.
So, let’s see what happens this weekend.
Road Trip
Even though I had a major fuck-up *salutes Major Fuck-up* yesterday afternoon at work, because I didn’t quite think things through, I still love working at System Dynamics. It’s just the right size to have enough going on to keep someone busy and it isn’t big enough to force you to concentrate on just one aspect of IT. I like the wide range of insight you get into different things depending on the circumstances. For example, I fixed a printer even before someone actually noticed (or informed us anyway) that something was wrong. Later I got to play around with the network some more which is when the fuck-up happened. I kind of forgot to make sure that the switch I put into the network wouldn’t mess up the spanning tree setup SD has running here and after showing Eamonn how to configure trunk ports, it hit me when people started banging on the server room door. Unfortunately, I’m also kind of quick on the whole “write memory”-aspect so there was no quick and easy way to fix what I had just done. However, there was that config.txt, which I had saved just a couple of days ago, so I quickly grabbed a USB stick and pasted the old configuration back to the switch. Problem solved, roughly 10 years of life expectancy lost but everyone had access to the servers, the network and the whole freaking world again. I’m really terribly sorry about that and I can’t believe I didn’t think about this possibility before messing around in the productive environment BUT this will also never happen to me again, lesson learned.
Later today, George and I will go and get our car from Dublin Airport and drive up to see the guys in Derry and have a beer to celebrate George’s birthday which was on Monday. We’ll spend the night there and in the morning, make our way down towards Galway where we’ll spend another night before heading back towards Derry and then Dublin again. You will probably read about everything we do along the way in either George’s or my posts. Considering the pressure we’re under with this road trip, I really wish there was a better way to deal with the whole program in a way that doesn’t force you to come right back home after the work is done. I would’ve liked the opportunity to maybe stay 2 weeks for a holiday and to have time to really enjoy this country.
I hope you’ll have a great weekend as I hope we’ll enjoy ours.
Angelo
Irish summer
Hey everyone,
I heard that the weather in germany is very good. Thirty degree and sometimes a little bit more. Well here in Ireland is also summer. Fifthteen degree and a lot of rain but It is typical for Ireland.
At the weekend Angelo and I will drive to Derry and visit some friends. After that we will drive along the westcoast towards Salthill. I think it is a great opportunity to make awesome pictures of the country, huge stonehenge, old monuments, beautiful houses and the endless fields.
I hope that the weather will be good on these days.
Yours George
Thursday the 29th
Hello everyone,
today I had a really exciting day at work.
Marco, Graham and I drove to a sub-office and they restore a lot of pictures and other things there so that they survive the next years and more people can see them in the museum.
In this building they store a lot of machines, pictures, statues, models and heads from dead animals and one Windows Server for all(Printserver,DHCP,DNS ….)
It is a very interesting place and Graham gave us a short tour through the building.
On all doors there is a security lock and you can only enter with a card but I thinks that should be okay because the store very old pictures which can not be replaced.
Marco and I had to add new Printer to the Printserver with the correct driver, I installed printers on the users PCs and should replace some XP maschines with Windows 7 maschines.
At lunch Graham drove with us to a Burgershop and this burger are really great but i missed to make a picture.
Since Last I Saw You
Since last I saw you
My heart didn’t beat
My tears kept on running
And my soul did weep
For your beauty is perfect
pure and divine
Oh if I could only
forever sit by your shrine
I would sit there and be
Till the end of all time
For that end would be also
– I’m sure of it – mine
After the weekend in Connemara, I had to call in sick on Monday because I woke up with a headache and nausea that made it hard for me to even write the emails to the different offices that needed to be informed. I lay in bed the whole day drinking tea and water and sleeping in between. I only had to take one Ibuprofen in the morning, though. I consider this good because I don’t really like being on painkillers.
I went to work on Tuesday and had new/further tasks to perform concerning SDs network infrastructure. I’m still tasked with the documentation but my work concerning switch documentation is mostly done and all that’s missing are the desk numbers and respective ports in use. Now I was asked to also create a new diagram showing the network layout. Now, you’ve seen the pictures; it’s a hell of a job, figuring out what goes where and what is what in the first place.
All the while, I’m also still fumbling around with my virtual environment and I want to get the most out of it because I might have to know my way around it later. I actually didn’t do much – if anything – concerning the virtualization today. I was busy making my way through cables and switch configs because another side project of mine, is to teach Eamonn the ways of the force… uhm the cisco switch cli.
I fear I won’t have enough time to finish even one of my main projects before my time here comes to an end. It’s almost mid-term and I’m looking forward to our trip to Derry-to-Galway-to-Derry-to-Dublin this weekend.
Well, good night!
Angelo