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.
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