Over the last 2 weeks a few things have happened which i’ll write about! I applied for a few jobs for when i move back to Manchester at the end of this month and one of them, ICT Support Engineer at a Consultancy firm actually emailed me and asked me for an interview. After a preliminary phone interview they were apparently so impressed they decided to offer me the job outright - which means they obviously see something in me This is good because it means ill be earning roughly £150 a week working 16 hours part-time, which means no being super poor! Hurrah.

Aside from the employment, it was my 21st birthday! I went home on the weekend before my birthday for a huge family party. On the Friday, me and Fran went to the rugby to see Wigan vs Hull (her first game EVER of rugby!) which we won 66-6 - so smiles all round! On Saturday we had a big family party to which about 40 people turned up - family and friends! On sunday, i took my birthday money and a bit of my own and bought an Xbox 360, games, extra controller etc and ive been addicted to it ever since

We came home on the Monday night and had a fairly quiet one. On Tuesday i went for a meal with Fran to Frankie and Bennys which was great fun followed by a few drinks etc afterwards and other stuff

Rest of that week and this week ive generally just been wrapping up loose ends in Swindon - i packed up and sent home 40% of my stuff when we went back up to Manchester, and the rest of my stuff is gradually being torn down and packed up. I lost internet connectivity on the 10th August as we didnt want to pay another £20 for an extra month worth of internet, it just means i dont have much to do on my PC anymore - lack of internet and Xbox 360 has led to that! On a side note - Fight Night Round 3 is arguably one of the best console games ive played in YEARS - so addictive in Career mode lol.

As far as life goes, im just getting ready to leave Intel and Swindon, move back up to Salford - start my new job, and wait until October when i start my final year of my degree again. Its very exciting times in the world of Sam Marsh - stay tuned!

Well, decided to play around with Ubuntu 8.04 with the view to partitioning my existing 80GB Windows XP drive into 2 partitions and then installing Ubuntu on the new one. However, upon loading the CD and booting into the “Install..” (Alternative to Live Disc), it recommended “Shrink Windows XP and install Ubuntu”, great i thought - i chose to do this and it froze - for 2 hours. On reboot - it went into windows, complained about corrupt files “Hal.dll” for example, and i had to reboot. On reboot it errored at me (non-Blue screen i might add), saying the corrupt files meant it couldnt load XP! Brilliant!

I dug out my Windows XP disk, however ive no idea how to replace a single file! I deleted it, then did a repair,along with a FIXBOOT and a FIXMBR, which removed the error, but when XP went past the “sliding window..” splash screen, it gave me a black screen with a low-resolution mouse cursor - which then did nothing! So i had to reinstall - pain in the arse Ubuntu !!!!!!!!

Aside from this, ive started playing with Solaris on my ESX Server - might as well learn that seeing as i have Linux and Windows notches on my CV already!

Also, in return for building Toma’s PC for him - hes using some discount he has with a web retailer to get me a Logitech G15 (2nd Gen though..), and a Logitech MX Revolution mouse, both for 76 quid Wooo.

Well, the construction of my super computer has begun lol After having 2 Woodcrest based boards with quad-core Xeon support etc and finding out that they are EEATX and that the only compatible chassis’ are £250+ i had to go back to the drawing board.

I managed to shotgun some old server rigs from our labs that were being binned as part of our clean out, which were physically big enough. However the PSU’s werent pushing enough wattage, more to the point they didnt have the correct 4 pin ATX12v connectors. This is easy to fix, however when coupled with the fact that the chassis front panel method of connecting to the mobo is so outdated it isnt even google-able, i decided to scrap the idea (No jumpers?! WTF?!).

Im going to just recap a little here, the reason im actually building this machine is for my virtualisation final year project, whereby im going to need obviously a fairly powerful machine to run all the VM’s, VM technology etc. Ive already got Education licensing for all VMWare products, and Xen etc. However the hardware is the issue.

Fast forward to today, whereby using a bit of blag and some guile ive managed to commandeer myself a Intel S5000PSL, capable of supporting 2 Socket 771 Multi-core Xeon CPU’s - of which i have 2, Quad-Core Clovertown Xeons, which will do very nicely.

Now i have the motherboard, and the CPU’s sorted, i need to find where to get my other items. I have a load of EATX chassis’ at my desk, but they are very old and very clunky and well..”Grey”. So i decided to make my first investment of this project, and spend £110 on an Antec Titan, an EATX Server Chassis thats comes bundled with a 650w Antec truePower Trio! Which is normally worth £70 on its own anyway. A Definite bargain. This will go great with my board and CPU’s.

I bought 2 Xeon passive heatsinks off the Intel Shop, which hopefully (fingers crossed), will work first time with the board and the case (mounting problems perhaps?). All that i need to do now, is get some FB-DIMM’s and im sorted. I might be getting some free from work as we are upgrading all our RAM from DDR2 to DDR3 as part of our refresh, otherwise you can get them for £59 for 2GB which isnt too bad at all!

After ive got Motherboard, CPU, Chassis, Heatsinks, RAM i need to procure a CD Drive and im going to be sorted. Then i’ll use one of my many hard drives and the server will be ready to go.

Interesting thing about VMWare ESX is apparently need to attach an iSCSI SAN to get it to install (it worked fine on a single core, AMD CPU based workstation system i had), which was a total fluke obviously as it wouldnt install afterwards on a Q6600 based system, or a Celeron D based system (neither have SAN’s funnily enough).

A way to get round this, is to apparently create a software based Linux SAN (a distro), so i’m currently looking into this. Anyone know where i can get this from?

Anyway, onwards and upwards. 

Well, im confused. My bank balance is X, but my available balance is X - 170 quid. Thats after ive paid for, my Linkin park and Jay-Z tickets (x 2), Yay. And all the crap i bought at the weekend!? The worlds gone mad.

In other news, ive bought and built my parents PC so that one is done. Regards to my own rig, ive decided against buying one and instead im going to use the freebies i get from intel to build it (cheers all). Apparently ESX requires a SAN, however theres apparently a Linux distro you can use to replicate a software-based SAN to fool ESX, so i’ll probably do that hehe.

Also, me and Fran are going up to Manchester next week because i have to do a university presentation on my placement year (fun fun fun). She’s also going to meet the parents too (oh no..). Should be interesting!

PS: Mi Shakes are amazing.

Didnt really do much last week except for chill out at Frans and work. Have been playing around with my servers a lot recently, chopping and changing O/S’s on my security box etc, and i think im going to stick with PF Sense (now ive got it up and running), its pretty nice. Although ive found a guide to setting up VMWare Server on Ubuntu 7.10, so i might turn it into a VM Box! Not sure yet.

Didnt do much on the weekend - watched the rugby, got my hair cut and generally relaxed with Fran, as everyone was away doing stuff!

Well, Valentines day worked to plan eventually! Ended up going to Tesco with Jamal and Gibbons on the way home instead of co-op as Jamal was driving, only to find out that because i didnt have ID, they wouldnt sell any alcohol to the other 2? Shit rule. So Jamal ended up kicking off, and 30 minutes later he was getting chased around Tesco by a security guard lol.

Got home at 6.30pm and set up the house - got dinner cooking (Lasagne), got the wine in the freezer, candles, music, etc it was all very nice. I managed to convince Fran we were going out for dinner, so she was fairly surprised when she came round mine!

Went to Manchester on Friday on the train with Fran, and got into Warrington Bank Quay about 7pm where i met Ste and Shannon and went to the Hares. Didnt do much the rest of the night. On Saturday we got the train from Newton into Piccadilly and spent the day wandering round before going back to our hotel to check in etc. Went to The Printworks at 7pm for Dinner and ended up spending 2-3 hours in Lloyds before heading off to Tiger Tiger for the rest of the night which was fun. Got back to our hotel rather drunk at 1am, but it was a good night!

Spent Sunday doing pretty much the same as Saturday - i showed Fran around Albert Square, St Peters Square, Arndale area etc and it was pretty fun. Spent a few hours chilling out in the gardens near the Urbis as the weather was nice. Ended up eating in the Food Court as it was easier, and headed to Piccadilly gardens where we sat and chilled out till about 3.30pm. Went to Piccadilly where we got our trains home and ended up arriving in Swindon at 8ish. Spent the night chilling out at Frans as we were both knackered and went to sleep about 10pm. All in all a very good weekend!

Well, im still plugging away with RHEL 5, a week down the line. This is good training for my RHCT! Samba is a very big pain in the ass to get working on this OS. Ive created the correct file structure, with permissions, owners (user AND group) etc defined. Ive then created the Samba shares, set the permissions, directories etc, and then enabled them, and still i cannot get online! It keeps prompting for a username and password all the time lol :S

I also had a play with getting NAT Masquerading to work using iptables - set it up as i always did except this time i didnt connect the outgoing interface to a switch just straight to the other computer, but it wouldnt work. Spent hours testing and configuring - ip’s are correct etc, and it has just dawned on me - i was using a straight-through Cat5 and not a crossover cable. Im an idiot sometimes. Hopefully when i go home and change the cable, it will all work hunky dorey - then i can sack off trying to get RHEL 5 to work as my new File Server and just use it as a security box instead - for now anyway!

Also, ive decided to seriously start studying for my CCNA; im designing a learning plan as we speak so i can start studying tomorrow - my aim is to have it passed by May/June.

Finally, valentines day is almost upon us - and i have a few tricks up my sleeve for Fran lol. We are going away for the weekend up to Manchester, which will be fun - plus im meeting up with Joe Joe and Con Cons for a few beers hopefully. Good times all round

Laters.