Last week Amit and I had to spontaneously visit the data center because one of our racks wasn’t accessible anymore and some services went down. We feared that the switch we completely filled with LAN connections last week went down due to overload. But as we went there we saw that the switch was ok and fully functional. We searched in the switch log for the problem and found out that the uplink port disconnects sometimes. The problem is we don’t know where the uplink is actually going. Then we got help from a employee of the data center and found out that the uplink goes in the switch from our other rack and after making a new cable connection to the other rack everything worked fine. The employee renewed the plugs because the cable goes 10 meters over many racks so we can’t just get a new one and we went back. But we still don’t trust the cable with malfunctions and we let it unused from now.
Kategorie: Dublin
Sunbathing and Soccer
Hello everyone,
the weekend passed very quick. I and my hostfamily watched the „Soccer World Cup 2014“ games and we speculated which team will be the winner. We decided the best team should be the winner..except England. Unfortunately there is no Irish team in the groups.
I also realized that a lot of Irish people go to the betting office and challenge their luck.
Actually we planned to go to the Irish east coast, but we deferred out trip to next Sunday because Ryan and Dillon worked the whole weekend. For that resaon we stayed at home and enjoyed the wonderful weather with drinks, snacks, music and more soccer games.
Along these lines..Cheers!
Weekend plans
Hey everyone,
the last days were very nice. At Work there arrived three new students from Portugal. We all work together and I am trying to help them anytime. Their english is not so good and it is very difficult to explain them something. I hope I can help them to enhance their english and technique skills.
The last two days we had nice weather in Dublin and Paul and I made some plans for the weekend. On Sunday we will drive to the east coast next to Northern Ireland and take a walk at the seaside and some lunch. I also want to meet some friends at the weekend. Hopefully the weather will be as good as today.
Yours George
Step Up!
4th place so far…
643k steps and that only got us 4th place. The leading team, the Holy Walkamolies, has 161696 steps on us and all that after I walked my feet raw last week. I am determined to lead my team to victory, though. So up until now, I already walked 60000 steps and after work today I will go to the pharmacy to get cushions for my toes because I have blisters in the most annoying places of all. Once my toes stop bothering me, I will keep going and going and going like one of those freaking bunnies out of the Duracell commercials.
I want to go (as in walk) to the Dublin Zoo on Saturday and walk back home, as well. I’m hoping to score another 60k at least on the weekend if I go to Greystones on Sunday, maybe. Even with some of my team members hanging behind – and I still think they’re doing a good job – I believe we can gain on the Walkamolies and even let the other two teams eat dust because we’re not too far away from them with 674k and 690k respectively. I’ll keep you updated on how it goes.
On Tuesday I sat in on a meeting with a guy from BT together with Eamonn and Emmet. System Dynamics wants to move their servers into a cloud environment. Well, sort of. The plan is actually to move the virtual machines onto new servers, connected with new switches, stored on new disks and stored in BT’s datacenter. I created a little draft with Visio to show what System Dynamics thinks how the setup will have to be and brought it to the meeting. My colleagues liked the way I did it and I listened in on them discussing different possibilities to set this thing up. Nothing is decided, yet and I believe I won’t be here by the time something “interesting” happens in that department but we’ll see how far this thing goes before I’m gone.
On the topic of being gone: It’s just over 2 weeks now until I have to go home. I’m happy I’ve seen as much as I have but there is still a lot left that I haven’t seen so there will be a vacation that has to be spent here within the next years. Something I’m already looking forward to.
The Problem with the flight home is the time it was booked for. It leaves at 7.10 in the morning and that is a terrible time to get to the airport in any convenient way, at least in Dublin and I don’t want to take a taxi, let alone have to get up at freaking 3 in the morning. So I’m actually planning on spending my night at the airport with the guys and a couple of beers. Probably not Guinness, though because it’s just too heavy and also not quite convenient to drink from the can It’s much more likely to be Budweiser or Heineken. Hell, if I get a good offer on Carlsberg, it’s going be that for sure. I’m not sure what we’ll do for dinner but there is supposed to be a McDonald’s that’s open 24/7 at the airport. I’m pretty sure that’ll do.
Tomorrow is the SD BBQ and the infamous Treasure Hunt. All I care about is steps, food and drinks and interesting conversations. Which is pretty much what it is. 😀
Cheers,
Angelo
Tuesday is cinema day
I got up in the morning and the sun shines right in my face and I though:
well it seems today will be a nice day.
After I reached my workplace the corrugated iron on the roof made some unusual noise. In the next moment I looked out of the window and saw a lot of hailstones.
I thought it is June and not December..typical Irish Summer
Tuesday is cinema day in Dublin.
In the afternoon Angelo and I went to the cinema next to „The Spire“ and saw
„X-Men: Day of Future Past“. I didn’t saw the movies before and still it was a very nice film.
After that we took a walk instead of the bus and enjoyed the evening sun.
Data center visit (this time with pictures)
Yesterday we visited the data center again to deploy one Dell server for our Hyper-V cluster. We got there with taxi again. At the way back it was even the same driver as last time. And the security guard was happier this day. It was all in all the same task like last time we went there with the exception that the switch in the rack we got still space for server is full now. So next time we need a new switch too. And like I said i took pictures. Note that unfortunately we can’t get better cable management because the systems run 24/7 productive and we can’t unplug anything not even for minutes. So we have to stick with the cables that some older System Engineers plugged.
. 
Carpe Diem
…not carpe just half the fucking diem!
That is why on Sunday, I got up at 8.45am, had breakfast and at 9.20am left the house to go (as in walk) to Howth. Google says that I walked around 32km that day but it’s not as accurate and it was more than that because I also did quite a lot of back and forth around the paths there. I did 47634 steps which brought me to a total of 136467 steps and my team of 7 people to 643791 for the week.
I actually awoke to the sound of rain which kind of put my mood down but I was still hell-bent on doing this walk. The rain only lasted a few minutes and then the sun tried her best to dry up the streets and sidewalks. It wasn’t dry but quite warm when I left the house and started towards Artane Castle to buy water and a snack at Tesco.
I continued down the road a few minutes later and turned left at the T-junction, walking towards the Artane roundabout. I wound my way through the streets of Dublin this way and soon came to Dublin Road which is kind of a coastal road leading to the Howth peninsula. It started to drizzle even before I came to that road but as I turned onto it, the wind from the sea was so strong that the tiny raindrops „fell“ horizontally and felt like needles, piercing the right side of my face. I kept walking and soon felt like this was some kind of punishment I had to withstand to be worthy of the sight that would be at the end of this road. The rain kept on lashing me for quite a while and only stopped when I reached Sutton which is located right at the entry of the peninsula. Of course, the rain started again a few minutes later and continued all the way until I reached the end of Howth harbor and the public restrooms. I was so unbelievably happy to see those restrooms.
I thought about having lunch in one of the restaurants but I don’t really care for seafood that much and considering the prices displayed on the menues, I stopped caring about “real” food altogether. I grabbed the small bag filled with nuts and raisins that I bought at Tesco earlier and took a couple of hands full. 200g of this mix really fill you up even though the taste isn’t as satisfying as that a nice steak with French fries would deliver, accompanied by a nice Guinness. Anyway, it kept me going and so I walked around the peninsula, came by the lighthouse, the beach and walked all the way back towards my home. Those last kilometers were really difficult and I had to sit down a few times just to rest my feet. My ankles and even my hips started to hurt before I finally arrived home. I had the dinner that was waiting for me in the oven, took a shower and went to bed, happy that I had used the day the way I did.
Please, take the time to enjoy these photographs:
Just a reminder: These photographs are resized to conserve space so if you would like to see any particular photograph in its original size and quality, please contact me when I’m back in Germany. 🙂
Glendalough
On Friday afternoon, Eamonn offered to take me to Galway on Saturday and maybe on Sunday to go up Croagh Patrick with him. Unfortunately he cancelled but offered to take me to Glendalough on Saturday instead.
Around 1.30pm, I met him and his wife Angela in the parking lot of Tesco and off we went in their car. We took the M50 that, much like the A10 for Berlin, runs around the city of Dublin. It is a tolled road but it is the quickest way from one side of the city to the other.
We drove through the Wicklow Mountains and stopped occasionally when there was something to see. There were definitely a lot of things to see as you will notice in the gallery below. In Roundwood, a small town along the way, we stopped for lunch and I had a burger with rocket, the famous green stuff that apparently everybody loves… personally, I think of it more like Reinald Grebe who put it something like “the weed that comes from abroad, is a lucky one”. Rocket is just a fancy dandelion and it doesn’t taste even remotely good. Fortunately, the beef and the onions were able to cover up the taste of it. The fries were awesome as well and I was absolutely satisfied when I had the cup of tea afterwards. The food was Eamonn’s treat which I found very generous of him.
We went on to Glendalough which is a glacial valley in Wicklow. There are different difficulty paths that run through the whole valley, along lakes or up mountainsides. It’s a very beautiful place to be and up on the mountains that enclose the valley, the air is serene and filled only with the many voices of nature. I took a lot of pictures that you can see in the gallery below but unfortunately none of them were able to catch the real beauty of the place. I’m starting to believe that no picture will ever achieve that. *sigh*
When I came home that day, Anne and her Family were having a BBQ so I joined them for dinner and later had 3 Guinness with Eamonn (Anne’s husband). It was a very nice evening and it went on for hours. I went to bed around 12.30am and set my alarm for 9am. Come back tomorrow to learn what I did on Sunday and why I had to get up so early.
Angelo
Quiet weekend
My weekend was rather quiet since I was a bit sick. On Saturday i walked from Clontarf to the South of the City center and looked at some places i didn’t visited before, like the harbor. It’s not the nicest I’ve ever seen but far away from the worst. Many ferries go from there and tourist journeys. After that day my cold got worse so I stayed in bed for the rest of the weekend so I don’t have that much to write about. But today Amit and I have to deploy a server in the data center again so I write about that when I got home. I hope everybody have a nice work week.
Sell me this pen!
Hey everyone,
the last days were very relaxed. I used the time to wrote a lot of postcards and skyped with my friends and family. Unfortunately it rain a lot today so I did my laundry and cleaned my room.
On Saturday evening I watched a movie with Ryan and Paul. „The Wolf of Wallstreet“ was a very long movie with Leonardo Dicaprio, but it was very nice and deep. It showed me how quickly life can change.
„Sell me this pen!“
I will enjoy the last three weeks here in Dublin, but we all know that time passed quickly if it is a nice time… and it definitely is.
Yours George