Monday, 31 January 2011

Nightside VM server

There have been issues in this project.

We have found that the hardware has been unsuitable for the work we want it for.

The issues have been that when this machine was purchased the manufacturer requirements for software were not checked, as a result we have been unable to succesfully install the VMserver software.

We have now attempted to install VMWares ESXI and virtual server 2, none of these have been fully operational.

Changes needed to be made to the linux kernel we had installed within the operating system and this was done with assistance by peter jackson. he is very good with linux and was ideal to learn from. this made the operating system one less thing to cause issues.

The initial problems suggested that we needed to upgrade the network adapter and the disk controller in the machine, I spoke to peter jackson of the technology team who helped me reach this decision. being relativly new to such a task peter was able to explain to me about the components needed, he explained what manufacturers to approach and what I would need to know to make the correct purchases.

After buying these parts we found that they did not do as we expected. The underlying problem is that we did not have the correct type of processor in the machine and no matter what additional parts we purchased we would always be caught out on that fact.



I contacted hewlet packard and spoke to neil duffy the sales manager for our area in an attempt to exchange the machine for one more suitable. I was informed that HP would not do this and any further parts or machines would be at full purchase price.

I have now been given a software project to work on and will not be taking this any further, unfortunately as a department I do not believe the server will ever provide a virtualisation service.

Thursday, 27 January 2011

New Project: ITS032 EDGE

I've been given a new project, this is my description of the project as I understand it:

Background

The purpose of the Edge project was to build a database for the careers section of Edinburgh University which would enable them to store and advertise career/job opportunities.

The system would allow administrative use for admin staff (ie they are able to alter reference data and approve submissions), general use for internal users or those with EASE credentials so no editing data and a read only section for everybody else.

Foreground

This project is easily two years old now and appears to have been a difficult one from the start, it hasn't followed the typical development procedure we have and is subject to various pressures such as a minimal budget, generous specification for that budget and apparent political influence.

The project was abandoned due to procrastination from the client on specifying requirements, during this the budget ran out and it lay dormant for a year.

Just before it was abandoned the previous placement student had written a design specification and started the build according to the spec, unfortunately the spec wasn't signed off and the application was built to what the project manager thought was 85-90% completion and was passed onto me as such. The task for me was to make up the remaining 10-15%.

The Task

  • Finish off remaining pages
  • test application
  • deploy application


Initial testing

On first glance the application appeared to work correctly, once I had sat down and gone through it with the requirements document it became apparent that it didn't work as well as first though and in order to complete the build which now was alot less the 85% there would need to be some heavy rework.




Nightside VM sever

The VM sever has been purchased to provide visrtual operating systems for developers to log into and do development work on a range of different platform such as windows or unix.

I was given this project as part of my computer rep role and I will be doing the following:
  • register the machine on the network
  • insinstall virtualisation software
  • tall an operating system
This task came about after a discussion with bill lee where he had spoken to me about buying the machine from another department after they found it was unsuitable for their needs and it may be usefull for our devcelopment needs.

As this task includes elements of software and hardware work it would be a usefull addition to my experience here on my placement.

Initially I did not know much about the underlying hardware or the virtualisation software. Most of what I learned came from speaking to colleagues and the internet.

I found that as the task progressed I was using the technical terminology more and more, in order to find out what software I needed to suit the hardware requirement I spoke to the technology teams Ian Fiddes to ascertain exactly what the machine speficifation was. In turn I recieved an email from him detailing the spec in order for me to check what the manufacturers requirements were.

I will be using this as a guide to what software will be compatible with our server.

Monday, 24 January 2011

Project: FIN058 - WebFirst Enhancements

New Project

I've been working on webfirst since early last week, there is no update last week because work stalled on Wednesday pending further information from the client.

Webfirst is not that different from Infinite in principle, it also controls staff access rights across a range of departments. The system receives a packet of data then copies this into a data structure, the structure also contains an array for certain aspects of data.

Once the system has populated the structure it then checks this data against its databases, where a member of staff does not exist (new starts for example) it creates one. Where the staff member does exist it updates their record. Once the main record is updated the system checks their access rights and updates that table with the new ones.

I have written the procedure above today, we are now still awaiting data from the client so the software I wrote can be customised to the data contained in their packet (for example table and data names).

I will update when we next move forward.

18th May 2011

Unfortunately this project hasn't moved any further forward, given the massive time elapsed I don't see it coming back to me. I have asked about it and there's no real explaination other than the client not coming back to us.

Shame.

Friday, 21 January 2011

ITSR21 - QuotaTracker Peer Test

My colleague chrisanne peer tested the quotatracker this week and I'm delighted that it has sailed through without any issues being raised.

The application has now been moved to the media teams server for usage, February will be the first report date.

If anything goes wrong ill update.

Friday, 14 January 2011

Back to work

Today is the end of the first week back after Christmas and new year, being 2011 now it reminds that this is now the second half of my placement here. It also reminds me that this placement ends this year and truth be told I don't want to go back to Napier.

Why some people don't work will always be a mystery to me!

This week has seen me work on a number of smaller jobs, the tasks have been:

  • Set up the departments new server.
  • Repair faults with the media teams tracker, faults introduced by themselves.
  • Review the implementation procedure for the ITS042 (External Event booking service) project.
The Server

Last year the department had a portion of their budget left over, the decision was taken that this would be used to purchase a new server. Bill has been since been looking to use the new machine to serve virtual PC's to remote clients.

The machine is fairly chunky piece of equipment, the rough spec being 1.5 terrabytes of storage, 24 gigs of memory and a 2.4ghz Xeon 5620 processor. Bill had planned to use VMWare server 2.0.2 as the virtualisation software but this is where the issues started to appear.

We had actually started work on this little project before the break, Bill and I spent a day setting the machine up. We initially installed Ubuntu Linux on the system (further utilising what I learned on the Unix course) and on top of that would go the VM software, however VMWare was not compatible with the processor architecture being used.

Intell Xeons come in a good sized range, ours is the 5600 series, one of the few architectures not compatible we discovered. After searching around for information on the difficult install we saw and attempted procedures to patch the operating system to allow the compatibility. We even changed the operating system to Centos 5.5 which is another Linux variant more suited to server applications. Of course none of the procedures we attempted were succesfull as the operating system was not issue, the hardware was.

I had started work on this in the morning and it was threatening to become a late night, it was now way past 5 o'clock and Bill decided enough was enough.

Back in this week and we tried again to get it running, we have since found out that vmware server 2 will not work with our machine due to the hardware issue. As a result we considered another virtualisation product offered by VMWare which was called ESXi (or vSphere) which containts their server 3 software, but this was not without its own problems, version 4.1 was again incompatible with the 5600 xeon.

I decided to downgrade the vSphere to version 4 at this point, I had read that it was compatible with our hardware and felt it offered the best chance of giving us a running system.

Unfortunately this presented us with new problems, although version 4 was processor compatible we found that it had issues with the network adaptor and the disk controller.

So far another two days have been spent on this, Bill has decided not to carry on at this stage and I'm awaiting further instruction before we do anything else with it.

This server was purchased specifically for this purpose, a far as I'm aware there is no other use for it.

The Tracker

The Quota Tracker built for the media team last year was deployed successfully however they attempted to make their own changes to the system which caused a bug in the way it organised its data.

I received an email from Alex at the start of the week regarding this and I worked on the repair and two upgrades on Thursday. These were as follows:

  • Move all data which is outwith the current month into the drill down interface
  • Suppress the display of excess data on the main page
  • Incorporate a system to review and delete expired data (this will keep the database from becoming too large and brings the application in line with data protection rules)
  • apply the changes to the users application
All the development work for this is now complete, I am still awaiting a response from Alex on how he wishes to proceed with applying the fixes.

ITS042 - External event booking

After the work I done on this project last year it was successful in the development environment and promoted to test. Unfortunately there are problems with the software in test however the current issues are not related to the work I did.

I was asked to review the implementation plan for this project, which was written previously by another developer. As no changes were made to infrastructure of the application I didn't make any modifications to the plan.

As I understand it, each environment (dev, test, live) is a little bit different, the reasons being is that the emulation of the live system becomes closer with each stage.

To carry out this task, I spent time mapping out the structure of the application and made comparisons to the different versions stored accross the K drive, the development server, the test server and in Visual Source Safe. I found that between them, there wasn't two identical copies.

The recomendations I made were that we use the development copy as a golden copy for redeployment to test, given that it was the one fully working copy. A tidy should be performed on all stored versions of this software and all copies should be brought in line with one another.

I have since been told that files were missed when the application was deployed to test. I am still receiving emails from the system when errors take place which indicates a problem outwith the scope of my project. Further to this I am aware that a larger project to replace the MyEd website is underway, this will supersede the current MyEd including the event booking system.


Right now I have completed all tasks outstanding for this week, I am using this time to bring my administrative work up to speed with the practical side.