Karl B

So I’m back at university now, over 4 years after leaving and here’s how it happened:

At the end of 2003 when I had two papers left to finish my degree I deciding, screw that, I’m sick of university I’m going to get a job! Amusingly it took my until of May 2004 to get a job so I could have done summer school and finished my degree, hindsight is ~20/20.

Anyway, I since I’ve decided to move to the UK to live/work later this year I thought wouldn’t it be smart to have a degree. I worked it all out with work, got the time per week I needed off and today this is where I was:

Standing in front of the lecture theatre wondering how I missed all the attractive girls my last time around at university, no really.

Well apart from the eye candy it should be a good semester, I have one useful and one interesting subject and I’m looking forward to getting better grades than I did my first time around.

After mulling over my previous post where I talked about server monitoring at work a thought came to me. I’ve been wanting to get back into programming as I haven’t done any serious coding since I was at university over 4+ years ago (I feel that I’m stagnating in the learning department) so I took the rant and decided hey, a project!

My thought is this: Monitoring agents should not really be needed on a server. From my workstation I can bring up a list of events from a remote server using eventvwr or a list of services by managing a server so why can’t monitoring tools?

I busted out Visual C# and after bumbling my way around for awhile I found System.ServiceProcess.ServiceController which you can use to find all the services and their current statuses on a local or remote machine that you have permissions on. In the coming weeks I expect I’ll be talking more about this as I try to write some rudimentary monitoring software.

Karl Out.

PS: Please don’t point out free software online which already does this, I’ve been trying to think of a good project for awhile and now that I have one I don’t want to lose it.

Lately I’ve become more and more  disillusioned by the server monitoring at my work.

I work in the IT department of a company which has a couple dozen servers supporting ~500 people. For reasons unfathomable to myself (politics) an out sourcing company does the monitoring/patching/etc of the servers at our work, something which I know we’re perfectly able to do.

I’ll give you some examples of poor monitoring

• Drives failing in raid arrays and not being picked up until one of the staff on site goes into the server room and notices the error lights and then notifies said out sourced support.
• Services dying on important (database) servers and no one being notified about it, only for the staff to find out about it on Monday morning and having to scramble to fix it.
• Using ping as a (sole) check of whether a server is available.
• Insisting that monitoring agents be installed on servers to monitor them and once they are installed the monitoring still being substandard(/non existent)

And what’s worse is all that happens is they get a slap across the wrist (a talking to) when on multiple occasions they’ve broken the SLA.

Rant, rant rant. (Please note: These are my opinions only and do not represent the thoughts of my employer)

This post is mostly a collection of information for myself about the UK to which I am planning to travel to later this year.

Which bank to go with: Pretty much everyone I’ve asked says HSBC so I’ll look into creating an account with them in a few months, I don’t really want to create one now as UK bank fees look somewhat more substantial than NZ ones and their interest rates quite the opposite.

One person did mention though that it took him over a month to get a bank account so I’ll definitely have to be at least slightly proactive, you know, like before I get there, right, good.

Another pressing question is to or HSMP (Highly Skilled Migrant programme or not, I’ve been told that it would look good on my CV and it can be extended where as a working holiday makers visa can’t be (I’d have to apply for a HSMP basically).

I can’t actually apply for the HSMP yet because I don’t have my degree but at the end of this semester I will (I’m going back to uni to do two papers to get my degree).

Everyone loves links:

www.moveflat.co.uk – Accommodation
www.fisher-consulting.biz/it_jobs.cfm – An IT job finding site
www.nzgames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=77292&page=5 – The opinions of random kiwis in the UK on a gaming forum.

I never get the first post in on Slashdot stories, I guess this isn’t exactly the same since it’s the first story but oh well…FIRST!

Anyway, if by some chance you stumble across this epic blog you’ll probably notice a flurry of postings in the next couple of weeks and then it will die off as a realise I don’t really want to tell the whole world what I’m doing.

Assuming that we get past the above stage and come to the second realisation that I’m an attention whore this blog will have the following uses:

- Documenting my attempts to get ready to travel to the UK
- Posting Random rants about things
- Stuff