Continuation

It looks like the fortune has turned to me and I’ve got a job at BBC World Service Future Media. Doing Unix systems only, no MS.

So far, I love it!

It was amazing 4 years of my professional life, working with Atticmedia. I had inspiring colleagues and great managers, they have became my great friends.  However since the takeover by BDP and new way of management, the company was on a way down. Read more…

Over the last 2 weeks we were moving our offices to Aldwych. Atticmedia has moved from Islington and BDP moved from London Bridge.

This move has changed my commute route. Now I have to travel to the centre of London. On the Tube or bus this will be unpleasant.

Recently, Boris ( the Mayor ) was talking something about using river service for commute.
One day returning from Canary Wharf to Aldwych I have tried it. It’s a charge on top of Travelcard or you can get additional season ticket.
But maan, I kinda fell in love with the Thames Clippers civilised way of travel.
No sweat, no pushing around  and there is a bar if you want to have your morning tea/coffee – I’ll add that’s cheaper than coffee shops.
Now, to make my commute affordable I have resign from Travel Card, what means that I will not be able to use DLR to get to Canary Wharf Pier.

This is where all these people around with bikes started working their magic. I kinda decided that a foldable bike may be an option. I had paid a visit to couple bike shops with my colleague and while he was recommending the full sized ones I couldn’t stop thinking about the ultra small one which I’ve seen on the Internet. He said the magic word ( A-bike ).

A-Bike Plus

Today I’ve ordered my first bike. The A-Bike. It has all what I need to get from Poplar to Canary Wharf and from Embankment to Aldwych without all the drawbacks of a full size bike.

Will see how it all works out.

As you have noticed I had a long drop in posts… work keeps me so busy that I have no desire to do anything else.

Last 2-3 week were particularly intense, I was implementing company wide VoIP based on Asterisk and Linksys phones.  Still stuff left to polish… Now BT thinks I’m a telcoms engineer

I’m tired, over worked. I’m counting days to my flight back to UK.

It’s the half of my tour in India. I am working about 10-12h a day including Saturdays. It’s hard to get anything done when getting parts or solutions from suppliers takes at least a week.

Biggest challenge for our business is actually the quality of Internet networks in India and international connections. We have outage at least one ever couple of days. International connections from India are also really bad, big latency and congestion.

I’ve recorded a long video ( about 20m ) from my daily commute from the Guest House which I’m staying at to my office. Enjoy the views.

So, I’m a bit busy now. I am developing bigger team to support IT services for Atticmedia and the whole BDP Media Group. Current location, India. The Atticmedia India is big enough to have their own IT staff. I am responsible for training of the staff and in the mean time, of my stay here, to assure high quality of IT service. The culture difference makes it even bigger challenge, but so far, I am enjoying it.

Virtualization

Due to server hardware refresh coming at work, I am investigating routes which we can take, one of the new ones is going virtual. It has couple of advantages like High Availability, and Fail Over which are very important these days ( users complain if their services are not available 100% )

So far I have covered VMWare Server and Infrastructure products. Where I like features of Infrastructure and price and ease of use of Server.

Now it’s time for XEN. From the beginning it looks very bare. Not like entirely integrated VMWare software, XEN is just the basic core and you need tools to use it and these come in plenty. Now I am playing with what came shipped with OpenSuSe. But just now I’ve briefly read on ganeti and I am impressed.

Linux KVM, hmm, I don’t have much to say for it. From what I’ve seen it’s not good for hosting MS Windows guest systems.

SAN

This is kinda strange, I know what are they, how they work, even used it in some testing. But I never had opportunity to work with a real, expensive solution. So far, Compellent is looking like the sort of things which I might consider installing. The only thing which worries me is license cost as well as resilience of a controller. If I have half a dozen servers connected to that bastard, they all die with it.

Routing

I am also in the router/firewall upgrade bucket. Choice is hard here, part of me wants a Cisco and the other one wants something cheaper but as good as Cisco. No part of me wants a Juniper, they are cheaper but from what I have seen they are awkward to work with. I’ve came across Vyatta, looks solid and as I am testing it, I can not find any limitations which would cross it out. But I don’t like it’s name, it does not flow on the keyboard right ( definitely not as well as my yllq )

I am still running, do not know why. Tuesday, Wednesday and today, Thursday, are like one day, I don’t feel any nights in between.

Tuesday, ah IT and Script Kiddies joint team drinks. Got beaten in table soccer, and pool, I am crap when it comes to pub games. But I was good table football player, not so long ago.

Wednesday, went to cinema to watch Mission Impossible 3, as usual movie done just for fun no value.

Today, watched Top Gear Winter Olympics. and now it is around that time when I have to prepare my body to bed.  

Have been asked to upgrade some Computer System. 2 HP desktops, and One HP server is on order, should be with me on Friday. Server will get a Linux and Oracle 10g Database

I hope that I’ll finish before going back to London.