Lost In The Web

belfast pianos, done in many other citys before. You wont be playing this one though – http://bit.ly/c9Yu2x

Dargeth has completed “Flag Officer”.

Dargeth has completed “Flag Officer”.

Just found out I won a copy of Bad Company 2 on the PC, Shiney!

Why do the problems always occur to the company’s major-important systems?

So today, We have fixed another problem with our (PITA) “Case Management System”

but for once, it wasn’t because of Oracle.

(I’m sure the picture to the left has already given you a clue where the fault lay)

So, rolling back a bit to January we moved the back-end of the case management system to an ISCSI SAN.  We used a managed Netgear switch due to Cisco’s own 2960G range being “in constraint” and taking 2+ months to be delivered.

This all ran fine until Wednesday night, when we finally received our two new Cisco Catalyst 2960G-24 switches for the ISCSI Lan.  In they went and reconfigured courtesy of the 3rd party company Novosco (I should really name-drop them here, because they were very helpful throughout )

Thursday morning, our system was off-line for some unexplainable reason.  We got them involved where some re-jigging went on to get it back up and going on only one server. Our CMS is clustered for disaster situations

Friday night, they were back in with us looking at the over-arching infrastructure… and the top cisco switch was factory reset to start reconfiguring it, only to discover that the unit had failed entirely.  Thats when the lightbulbs came on!

This morning in went the old Netgear switch which was brought back in, and the iscsi san came up first time.  The bottom cisco switch was tested and it came back all OK as well… We had received a faulty top switch
What didn’t  help was that the top switch was the “master” switch of the pair, it explains why fallover and LACP was screwy and things didnt work.

So the faulty switch is on its way back to Novosco’s office with the engineer, and the system is up and operational now, ready for them to use it again on Monday morning using only one switch.

The only question now is, how long until something else breaks and takes down the CMS   It better not be the other bleeding cisco switch!

@bittech DICE for the win \o/

Boldly going, where a few thousand have been, are going, or will be going shortly in NCC-93719

So, that’s another mini-project “started”

At 10am this morning, we started the initial setup of a Blackberry Enterprise solution in with us.  This you would normally think would be dead simple,  Throw in the box and configure it, then open a few ports in a firewall and away you go.

Well, our network is not that simple   Its quite complicated to explain how it works but our connection goes via two other “sections” before it touches the Internet,  so giving us numerous firewalls  to configure to allow the Blackberry solution to even remotely talk externally. I only have authorisation to change 2 physical devices while the rest are managed by individuals in the other sections.

So by 2pm today, our BES solution was able to communicate with the great big world.. and from then the first 2 company Blackberry phones have been activated So two poor hapless souls here suffer the indignation of having to carry a phone capable of accessing their work emails anywhere and any time.

The good part is, that I am not one of them so far.  And its effectively a pilot to allow the company to “test” the devices.
(truthfully, its the way management are trying to sneak the solution in under the radar so its suddenly available to all who need it later, without having to jump through the many hoops of buying the kit, when its already installed under a pilot)
This should make for an interesting few months then, once I receive the remaining 18 handsets and issue them out to the respective “testers” so they can break them!

This message was not sent from a blackberry device

Ha! Just been informed that our Disaster Recovery site in Antrim is flooded.

So that’s a couple grands worth of equipment fried/dead/BER

What a way to start the weekend

So I now have to finish my lunch (which I was having late today) and drive from Belfast, up to Antrim to “get on the ball” and make sure we don’t lose more kit.

Who says working in IT is boring?

Right,  so after many many hours of Left 4 Dead 2 with a few friends on Steam we have came across some interesting facts.  This has been noted on our steam community servers which are running Sourcemod with the country code mod enabled.

1. The French seem to be the biggest country with “RageQuitters”, but this could be attributed to two situations
   • They don’t communicate with the rest of the team, yes I know french is a language but nearly everyone else uses English or “Pigeon English” to communicate stuff.  being able to shout “CHARGER BEHIND” in voice comms does help stopping you getting raped by said charger
   • some of them only want to play as Infected who win the round, if the survivors make it to the safe room they quit very quickly.
2. A well co-ordinated team who does well in versus, never gets past the 3rd level due to the ragequits. If a team is losing then there is less effort to actually “win”.
3. There’s more Aggro going around in-game, especially directed towards the new players (or n00bs as people love to refer to them).  They of course don’t help themselves if they immediately join a versus game when they have never played single player before
4. Team Versus is almost as bad as “public” games, if the teams loses a round they all quit. some stuff we’ve noted are:
   • There’s more interest in playing the first level of Dead Center, just for the charger Insta-kill points. (if they fail to kill anyone in their round, they quit)
   • They are quicker to aggro than public games, with accusations flying normally within the 2nd level (again, hard to ever complete a versus game during Team Versus because of this)
   • Some teams take it very very seriously, if they immediately ask if the server your playing has cevo settings you know they are competitive.  They are also the teams who use Ventrilo instead of L4D2′s in-built voice comms (some teams don’t like the seconds delay you get at times)
5. There is no friendly “banter” between the teams, everythings  taken so severe.  I don’t know if this is because a lot of people seemed to have came across from CS:S more than the original L4D players. (this we’ve noticed more of these players popping up since Christmas time)

It is always funny when playing and you realise someone on the opposing side doesn’t have a microphone, you start to pick on them more because the team can’t exactly react to someones shouts when they have to open a text box and type in “HELP!”

I guess one reason we notice the ragequits more often lately is that we normally play as a “team” together.  Tho most of the times across voice comms our conversations are less about the game and more about random stuff that’s going on, or my cackling

Again, most of whats noted here has been on our steam community servers (hosted at fussake.com ) so you may find it completely different on other servers or with other communities.  Just remember tho if the person doesn’t speak in game either they don’t have a microphone, or they’re french!