It’s over

My job in Bacolod is done, so I’m officially closing this blog.

I want to thank you everybody that has followed my over the last 4 weeks and hope you enjoyed reading my post.

Salamat!

There is always a “goodbye”; this time is a “see you”

No end to work; even on the last day

Despedida

The Spanish way to say “living party” is “fiesta de despedida”, so it seems that they took it from us, as much more words and expressions.
We had it last night again in the amazing Mr. and Ms. Dumancas’ house; delicious food, but with something new this time: “lechon” (roast pork). I have to say that I didn’t really like the lechon I had eaten, but last night was lovely, very taste, even the skin!
After the dinner Duke played a presentation that Jaana had put together about our clients and ourselves (very successful, and funny… loll). Then all of us contributed with a small speech about our experience here and turn for the karaoke! They wanted me to sing something in Spanish, but I managed to skip it (good for their hearing )

Weekend in the paradise

• Private island for us for a weekend
• 3 meals + 2 snacks per day
• White sand beaches
• Snorkeling
• Reefs and many different kind of fishes
• Blue starfish (never seen it in my live!)
• Sunset from a private yacht

 

        

Sandwich and plain rice

I’m not feeling really good today (I wonder what the hell they put in our drinks last night!), so I’ve decided not to have delicious and fancy food for one day and stay in the hotel all night.
We’re heading tomorrow morning to Danjugan and I don’t really want to be sick!

3rd and last weekend

Day 2 at La Salle

Today was supposed my last day at La Salle, but as my client is off to Manila till monday I’ve decided that I can call over the university tomorrow as well.

It was an interesting day as we started to deploy nagios and add some clients (both windows and linux) into it. We also had time in the morning to talk about some other issues they use to come across with, such as network performance. For a better understanding of it, and being able to come up with a possible solution, we’ve asked them to draw a general design of their network, with all the appliances (which are not few) and identify the kind of traffic on each area (connection to internet, or just lan traffic), so hopefully tomorrow they’ll have something for us and we can have a discussion about it. We’ll also be looking at a wiki and ticketing system software, for problem management.

We’re working with two groups: the ITC (Information and Technology Center) and the Library. ITC is the big team here, and they manage their internal applications and broadband connection. It’s great to work with those guys, their attitude to learn is incredible, and are open to any suggestion we make them.

Karaoke party at MITCS

Just back from the MITCS office (my client) where we were having a dinner/karaoke party.

These people really love singing! and they do it pretty well!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

We had the typical lechon (roasted pig), carne frita (fried beef meat), fish and plain rice, all with beer, wine and even vodka! loll

2-days visit to the University of St. La Salle

I was invited by Robert to visit today and tomorrow the university to have a chat with the IT guys, see the infrastructure they have, issues they are facing and how to resolve them, get some new services in place…

I spent the morning basically going around from one place to another having a look at the infrastructure and the labs. In some areas they use mostly windows boxes (as per requirements), and in the library they are based on Linux. Probably the thing that brought my attention was the cabling; it’s not very structured so they’d run into big problems if they ever need to troubleshoot it.

After lunch we had a meeting scheduled for 1:30, and Robert was finally able to make it. I found it very productive, as we identified key areas where there is place for improvement. Some of them were related with network monitoring and management. Basically they’d like to be able to control the bandwidth they give to the labs and offices. They also want to deploy nagios as monitoring system, so I was doing a live demo on how to deploy it. We had a look at some ticketing system, wikis, and also source control software.

So tomorrow we’ll go through some open source tools, and we’ll do a hands-on part in the lab; sounds exiting.