So on Friday we took it upon ourselves with permission obviously to rackmount one of the new virtual machines base computer into a rackmountable case. As currently they are normal desktops from the lab rooms which are across the desks which doesn’t look very professional also kinda bad if they get unplugged and vms go down! The case we got for this job was the departments old game server, this had packed up with one core not working and since was xeons we couldn’t afford to replace this so upgrading a server case from a full size server motherboard with old harddrive connections with only molex power to a new quad core AMD machine with sata was a challenge. Getting it out was the first challenge with no decent screwdriver (till we aquired one from Adam (thanks)). There was so many screws holding the thing down but we striped it right back to bare metal eventually allowing the motherboard mounts to move to more suited locations. With no back plate for the harddrives we had to wire them in manually in the hot swap bays as a new back plate would cost about £60 which we couldn’t justify with still wanting a 24 port gigabyte switch (managed if possible) anyone got one send it my way! But anyhow most things went without a hitch still got more fans to wire since out of the 7 case fans only one works from lack of fan ports on the motherboard but hopefully a molex adapter will sort this as we had to do with the sata power also. We had some rewiring to do also as the old board was 2 physical cpus so had a 8 pin power to the CPU so we hacked one off another CPU and joined a nice 4 pin onto it, rather a good job but Ash said he will solider it just to make sure on Monday. So that’s another server nearly done. Now just need another 3/4 cases to do the rest!
Archive for February, 2012
Guitar tuning
With Emily winning a guitar at spiders night club a few weeks ago I thought I would have a look at it and see if I have any musical talent left after my many years music practice. Working out quickly that it was massively out of tune I decided to download a Android app to help me do this but as constant volume and pitch wasn’t my best thing since never played guitar this was interesting taking about 2 hours till I was happy! But it is a beautiful guitar just no amp but good enough to play around with and who can complain for £1 of raffle tickets! Not me!
Pancake day
So today was pancake day me and emzi have eaten sooooo many today but was gorgeous!
Pair programming
Working on the Raywell website we was designing the code behind the booking checker system which turned out to be rather simplistic code but unfortunately not so efficient in due course from the standards where using doesn’t allow masses of manipulation before we download it onto the server to be processed.
If that’s all gobble-goop this post probably isn’t for you.
But as I said we were coding the system which we have chosen to get from Google calendar into MySQL for processing quickly on the server (once it’s there). Aftereq a few issues in permissions between calendars made on domains and normal @gmail.com accounts in linking a @gmail.com with full edit and management positions it allowed us a private feed go ical (which domain users don’t get for security reasons … seemly correct me if I’m wrong)
So the basic principle of our code was to take iCal format from Google calendar services for each building which is formatted like:
Variable:data
Just a new line for a end of lime character for them all. They also are split into sections but use the same implication as above.
So with all this we made it a array which then checked the database if it was deleted (not there anymore) updated (using timedate and new to insert so this synced MySQL with ical. This now means making the user interface for queries a doddle. Just need to clean up the code so a method can be made just to plonk a iCal feed for each building in an all! But progress is good for now!
Network
Network for anyone who doesn’t know is the oldest section in Scouts 18-25 year olds which is the section I’m presently part of technically. When at the merger meeting for the Hull districts we met up with the county commissioner who we first met at Raywell management, she then introduced me and Emily to the network who are trying to expand with the new district merger, at present I’ve still not attended a meeting as their meetings are on the first of the month but looking positive to able to meet them outside of another meeting!
