Schlagwort: Work

dinner with celtrino

Yesterday our office went to show cooking in the city center. After we finished work at 17:30 we all went to a place that does wedding party’s and show cooking. It’s like a open hall with a big open kitchen in one of the corners and huge round tables. So first watched him preparing and cooking the four-course meal and then we ate it. Obliviously the second part was the better one. The quality of the food was astonishing. I took photos of the dishes but forgot to do one on the first dish. It was mushrooms on toast and a mushroom soup.

my work space

It’s a bit late for me uploading some pictures of my work space but I didn’t through about that before. The office is in the highest floor of a building on the Parnell street. The entrance is on a parking lot that is used for us and the other company’s around here. The building and the overall look in that area is not that nice. It looks really old and unkempt but the office itself is really nice and looks neat. I don’t have a picture from the hole office because its completely open and I don’t want to annoy anyone.  

 

Working in the Linux Shell

Because there is not that much to do here I work on my Linux Vserver most of the time. I connect to it over ssh and use only the shell for it. Mostly I play a bit and install software and server solutions for fun and experience. At the moment I try to get my Linux VPS as secure as possible. I started to install fail2ban a linux software that creates logs and bans IPs that fail to connect via ssh to often. Its fairly powerful and in combination with sendmail its even capable to send me mails with information’s about logins and failed connection attempts. Now I try to get a program that captures network traffic to write a log file and send it me per mail in a time interval. To see if suspicious IPs connect to the server or anything eats my bandwidth. Maybe I write a entry when I have that done and with which tools.

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

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.

Detailed look at my data center visit

Last week on Monday Amit and I had to deploy a new Hyper-V server in our rented space in a data center in the industrial district of Dublin. It was a Dell Power edge we configured the week earlier. So Amit came to my desk and said we have to go, so we head over to our small server room in the office and get our server. We went down stairs and to my astonishment we went to the street and waited there. I looked over to him doubtful and he said he called a taxi. I was really surprised. So when the taxi finally came we deployed the server in the trunk and got in. Unfortunately Amit forgot to take the mount rails with him so we had to turn after a quarter of the route and Amit ran up the stairs and packed the rails. The ride was nice i got a good look on the south west of Ireland. So we arrived at the data center that looked more like a garage from the outside but with high tech in the inside. Inside was a security guard at the reception that had a look at his face that said „I want to quit my job“. We had to give him our ID cards and got access cards for the doors. We had to go through a big tube that „Scanned“ us. I don’t know how and what it scanned because it could not be metal since i got the hole server in my hands. After that we got into the server room. We have 2 rented racks in it and Amit showed me both. Then we deployed the rack and asked a coworker that does home office if everything is OK with the connection. After that we we got in the lounge and drank a coffee. Then we wanted to go home and quit a bit early, unfortunately Amit got a mail on his phone that one of our clients domains went down. After plenty of calls at domain hosters we found out that they contract just expired and they didn’t renew it. So we decided to went home. Of cause we got back to the city center with a Taxi and Amit got out earlier at the rail station and gave me the money for the taxi driver. And after that i enjoyed my end of the day.

One is not enough

Hey everyone,

the third week is nearly over and it doesn’t get boring. In the last two days I organized a lot of stuff for the stockholder, the PXE-Server and WSUS.

I cleaned the whole office and built a nice bench for our WSUS and PXE project.
A workmate and I installed all cable in the office so that it is easier to test the incoming hardware and to operate on the desks. We also repaired an old printer. The printer is now working on both workplaces and the Cisco switch is also connected to our servers and works fine.
We are looking forward to create a domain and test a very nice tool for the pxe installation.
I examined our network „rack“ and was horrified. It does not look as bad as the racks in Angelo’s company but now i understand a little how he felt while he tried to took apart the mesh.
Beastly job..

 20140522_111521

We also finished the „6-monitor-build“ for the stockholder and gave him a little
presentation how it looks like.
The PC works nearly noiseless and don’t need too much space.

6monitors

The next project will be a little PCs which support between 10 and 12 monitors.
I am glad that I have the opportunity to pursue my interests.

 Yours George

Hyper-V „Server“

Doe to the fact that we use Hyper-V as virtualization solution, I build a Hyper-V „server“ myself today. And i say server in quotes because we only had a Dell Core 2 Duo PC left for testing. I was lucky that it got 4 GB RAM and it ran surprisingly well. But i had some problems that the system center that is used to manage the VMs only works in a domain with a domain admin and I can’t add the V-server to the company domain. So i build my own. And like I said it ran astonishing good. 

The first four days went by

Hi there!

Right now is my fourth day at Steria Ltd. Meanwhile I’ve learned a good half of the names of my colleages, so it’s much easier to communicate with each other. 😀 The first day passed really fast, because the meeting lasts almost 3 hours. After that I was introduced to the daily check-up routines and the ticket system, which I couldn’t use, because I didn’t get web access with my laptop – more on that later. The next tasks were some warranty research for some hard drives for a NAS and the comparision of two config files. Afterwards we called IBM for the reference numbers of the hard drives, which we need for the warranty processing. Some minutes lates we’ve got a call from IBM again and it turned out, that IBM have made mistakes in 7 of our 8 warranty cases, so we need to correct the statements together. Yesterday I was on tour with Rick Browne for some field work. We went up to AMI (Asset Management Ireland Ltd), where we erased the hard drives with a strong electromagnet. Today we went down to Dungannon to restart a shut off NAS at the South Tyrone Hospital.

Just like the Charité IT team in Germany, where I’ve done my last internship, Steria supports hardware for hospitals, with the small difference that we only support X-ray computers, servers and network storage here – thank God.

Next, I will get an introduction of all the contracts of Steria. And for next week it is planned to let me test some new apps.

And now back to my web access problem. I have figured out that Skype is functioning all the time and only the web access is blocked sometime, so the next days I will try to find out which ports are blocked and which not.

short summary of my work experience

I’ve worked for 3 and a half days now. I don’t have to much to do because our projects start the next weeks. So I had much time to talk to the employees. The company is really „colorful“, we got many people from different country’s here. And it is much fun to hear all the story’s and experiences. And I don’t feel that bad when i got words wrong or pronounce them wrong because nearly everybody does that too. I’m really looking forward the next weeks.