Archive for the ‘IT Mangement’ Category

A Nightmare In The Server Room - Old Hardware

Saturday, August 16th, 2008

Spent the last 2 days at work trying to install Ubuntu Server on an old IBM NetFinity M7000 M10 server (2x Pentium III Xeon 500MH, 512MB RAM, 100GB RAID-5 SCSI), and although installation was successful, booting the server was not. Tried many ways to troubleshoot the problem, and finally found something interesting - Fedora Core 9 LiveCD was able to boot up without any tweaking of the GRUB boot options. So, I decided to install Fedora Core 9. However, the server does not have a DVD drive, and DVD drives are a rarity at my workplace, so I had to hunt for one. Additionally, the server does not have a network card (it only had optical fibre), so I had to dig that out as well. Thankfully I found them, installed them into the server. The DVD drive was in-use by another PC, so I had to leave the cover open on the server while Fedora Core 9 was installing (about 1.5 hours). Still have alot to do, like updating the server, installing secured remote access software, and configuring network shares, but those should be a piece of cake - hopefully by next week it can be put to good use as a testing/development server.

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Busy, Busy Days

Sunday, August 3rd, 2008

Sorry for the long delay in posting, its been almost a month since I last posted. Been really busy with the final year project, and the prototype was only submitted last Friday - hope that the assessment would be a good one. On top of that, my subordinate got into a minor motorcycle accident two weeks ago, and as a result, I had to run around like a madman for the last two weeks, preparing equipment for others, checking staff clearance forms and solving the usual technical problems.

Thankfully, last Saturday was a day of just fun & games at my workplace, although the final game was so wierd that I refused to play it. Then got dragged out by my ex-platoonmates to watch The Dark Knight, which was well worth the price and time spent in the theatre. Absolutely liked the Joker’s genius. Had dinner at Tao’s at Paradiz after the movie, and my impression of the food was good, and with excellent customer service as well.

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Drowning In IT

Wednesday, July 9th, 2008

Well, it’s been a busy two weeks - most of the time spent on either calling vendors, surfing the internet to check out product specifications, and also budgeting at work, and in my spare time, PSP programming and doing the project proposal for my FYP, amongst other things. Its amazing how fast new stuff can come out in times of economic growth.

Just had a major event this morning at my workplace, and I’m glad that it’s over. Somehow the confidence level in IT doesn’t seem to be high, as compared to my previous one - perhaps I can make a change in the coming months. Met new people as well, and they’re really friendly, much more friendly as compared to my previous workplace. However, due to my work, seems that I will seldom get to interact with them…sad.

I finally managed to get my D-Link DNS-323 NAS to run Transmission and Clutch yesterday night, so that I can power off my PC while my NAS box does all my hard work for me. Hopefully this month’s electricity bill won’t shoot up so high.

I ordered a capacitor on Farnell’s website to fix my x51v’s capacitor last week, and I made a major mistake - I used too much force when removing the capacitor, and the solder pad came off the PCB. Looks like I need to spend money on conductive paint to fix it, hopefully.

I’m planning to get an Asus eee PC, but I’ll get a hands-on on the two units this weekend before deciding which one to get - the 901 or the 1000H.

Caught Get Smart last Tuesday with EK and Seansean, and had a real good laugh over the show. The wit and humor in the movie was really enjoyable.

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Wait to Rush, Rush to Wait

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

Yeah I know I’ve not been updating my site lately - tied up with work and my final year project in school.  In fact, I just came back from a meeting with my project supervisor at Plaza Singapura today, and there’s still lots of work to do in order to properly finish our project.

Anyway, so far the new job is quite alright, its the waiting for the action to start that kills. On top of that, boring stuff have to be documented for the end-users (as more often than not, their computer literacy is quite bad), as well as local system documentation for whoever takes over my position in the future.

Its kind of amazing to see that most people do not know that there are free alternatives to expensive products that can do the most of the job that they need - for example, Audacity versus Sony Sound Forge, OpenOffice versus Microsoft Office, Ubuntu Server versus Microsoft Windows Server 2003. Its even more shocking to realize that 99% of an organization’s primary and secondary servers run on Windows Server 2003. Especially for server operating systems - the more simplified they become (through GUI), the weaker the future generation of server administrators get. Although simplification is good, it is also important to have a strong foundation in using the command line as well.

Posted in IT Mangement, Open Source, Rants, University Nights | No Comments »

Friday 13th in Sembawang

Sunday, June 15th, 2008

My last day of work was on Friday, and I left my workplace slightly earlier before knock-off time to go to my company HQ in Alexandra. When I reached there at 5:15pm, sadly, office was closed, so have to go on Monday. So much for “Human Resources”. Will miss my colleagues there. Suddenly, for some strange reason Westlife songs suddenly become nice.

Went out for dinner with some of my army friends at Jack’s Place at Marina Square yesterday. Reached MS slightly ealier, and chatted for a while with Peiling, Jamie and Xiping, from my old workplace as they happened to be there for a street netball competition. Wish them all the best in their endeavours. Most probably the last time I see them in person, though.

Bought the D-Link DNS-323 NAS from the PC Show (temptations, temptations…), and currently figuring out how to set it up. The strange thing is most people buy a NAS and then get stumped figuring out how to configure it. Even then, assuming you have the technical skills to do it, you will also need to consider the following factors:

  1. What is the primary use for this NAS? Power-savings? Storage? Sharing?
  2. How to secure the box? Which network shares to create? What users/groups will be created?
  3. What is the backup strategy? JBOD, RAID 0 or RAID 1? “Off-site” backup on top of RAID 1?
  4. Any disaster recovery procedures? What do you do in case of hard drive failure, or worse, NAS hardware failure? Will you use an UPS with the NAS?

Right now I am on a different kind of problem - I don’t have any hard drives to spare (since the manual states that plugging any drive in will result in the drive being formatted), and I’m currently imaging data off one of my hard drives for use in the NAS.

Posted in IT Mangement, ITSS, Memories, National Service, Technology | No Comments »

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