Kategorie: Allgemein

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.

 

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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.

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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

Some words about the new Godzilla

Hi there!

Actually I wanted to post some more of my impressions of the new Godzilla  movie and hide them with the spoiler tag, so that anyone who hasn’t seen the movie yet can still enjoy it. But unfortunately JavaScript is blocked and it seems that some WordPress templates are missing, so I can’t even use the more tags.

So, yeah, yesterday we watched the new Godzilla movie, this time in 3D and this time with a group of 8 people, so nearly everyone of us was there. As a Japan fan I really liked the new version of Godzilla, because it’s more like the original one. But what’s really bothered me all the time were the not plausible physics. Sometimes I even had the feeling that nobody of the film crew ever was thinking about that. Let me give you one example. When Godzilla appears he nearly causes a tsunami, but when he plunges into the water again he causes only a smooth wave…

But if we ignore that Godzilla was a really cool movie. 😀

Every cloud has a silver lining

Hey everyone,

yesterday I celebrated my birthday with my host familiy.
The bought a little cake with candles on it.
They are so polite and I was very happy that they noticed that.
The weather here in Dublin alternates between sun and rain so fast. The last days were unfortunately rainy and cloudy.
Only on one day the weather was very warm and sunny
so I decided to visit the botanic garden in the west of Dublin.

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Ryan came with me and he showed me also the big graveyard in Glasnevin. It is the biggest graveyard in Ireland and looks so amazing. We seen the grave of Daniel O’Connell. He was an Irish political leader and campaigned for Catholic Emancipation. His grave is beneath a round tower.

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After that we went to the city centre and had a lunch there. Ryan was looking for a tattoo parlor. We strolled through the little side streets and Ryan made an appointment in the tattoo parlor.

Afterwards we took the bus, drove home and enjoyed the cloud-free evening.

Yours George

Ireland Is Ridiculous

…ly beautiful!

Seriously, this country must be photoshopped. I took a lot of pictures this weekend, none of which will actually be able to show any of the beauty of this place. You cannot capture this on film, canvas or keep it in your memory for long. I am very sad because that last part becomes so brutally clear to me now.

My alarm went off at 5am on Saturday. I washed up, put my hiking boots on and started walking towards city center at 5.50am. It was raining that day and I took out my umbrella to try and keep my backpack dry. I wasn’t very successful and in the end, all my stuff was wet – not dripping wet but wet nonetheless.

The bus left Dublin city center around 7.25am and we arrived in Westport just shortly before 11.30am. We had a guided tour through Westport and an hour for lunch afterwards, where we bought food and drinks for the evening. We then left for Croagh Patrick, the mountain that Saint Patrick allegedly sat around on for quite some time, quite a while ago. The hike to the first level already had me completely drenched but not from rain but from sweat. It was very beautiful up there and I would have loved to go all the way to the top but that would’ve taken at least another hour and a half and we didn’t have that much time. When we were back at the bottom and left Croagh Patrick, our goal was to reach Kylemore Abbey at 5.30pm to have a 20min tour through the Abbey. We didn’t quite make it but still had the tour with another guide, after which we visited the garden and the little chapel.

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When we arrived at the Sleepzone hostel, the view was absolutely stunning. The hostel itself is located at the Killary Harbour, a fjord connected to the North Atlantic. And again I’m devastated when I think about how much beauty was simply lost when I look at my pictures now.

I had a couple of beers after dinner and went to bed at 3am in the morning. My alarm woke me up at 7am and I washed up and went to see if the sunrise looked as amazing as the sunset of the day before. My expectations were greatly outdone by what I saw and I was certain that my eyes weren’t worthy of the sight that sat before me. I’m not ashamed to say that it brought tears to my eyes and I will always remember this moment though the images will fade from my mind eventually.

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Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears. ~Edgar Allan Poe

A new week

Im looking forward to the new week. My co-worker said there some projects we have to do this week. So im really looking forward to this since there wasn’t that much to do in the last weeks. It’s hard to get much work or problems (that get work) in a company with ~20 employees. Most are server projects but i can’t go on my own since the company got strict security guidelines. So i hope there is plenty of work this week.

My trip to another part of the city

Yesterday I went to the Bloomfield Commercial Centre for shopping purposes, it is something like a big complex of firms which are offering all kinds of products. But the way to there was some kind of an odyssey. In my opinion the bus system in Belfast is really confusing. Usually there are (at least on the more frequented stops) two or more stops in the same row which are about 10 – 30m away from each other and where different busses are departing. And in addition to that (if you have managed to take the correct bus) there are no announces at which stop you currently arrive so without local knowledge and a mobile battery which is dying out you are pretty much lost. After exiting at the wrong stop and a few talks with locals who have pointed me in the right direction I’ve managed to arrive in the center. The terrain is really big and at all I think it’s bigger then everything related I’ve seen in Germany yet. I went to the Tesco, Maplin, a pretty big one-pound Store and a few shops in the main centre it self. After spending a few hours and a lot more money I started my way back home with a full bagpack and few shopping bags. All in all it’s pretty interesting to see how big Belfast really is. There is a lot of suburban area and outskirts around the main city itself, some nicer ones and some not so nice but there is definitly a lot to see.