Avesta Trip, Day 4

02/09/2010 06:36

I have been in Avesta for 3 days to work with a company who is helping us implement Operating System Deployment. This is something that I have tried to get working in the past, but with bad results and a lot of hair pulled out of my head from stress. I have been working with a very competent guy called Christer, his English was very good and he spoke with a Yorkshire accent; he has a friend who came from Yorkshire and has known him for many years… It was just like being in Sheffield, duck.

We have worked hard to get the system up and running, and after 3 days we have succeeded to deploy Windows 7 to our standard model of computers, including drivers and joining to our domain. The next thing will be to set different country settings and choose which applications we want to deploy to each computer - this will then all be automated, freeing up people to work on more important, and less boring tasks!

I have had a great time while I have been here - it turns out I work with quite a lot of Avesta employees and I had never met anyone face to face… So it has been fun meeting the people who I talk to on the internal instant messaging and email. Hopefully while I am here I will depart with some information about the things I am working on at the moment, they are quite interesting and it isn’t so easy to communicate this information out over an email or memo, I think it is better to talk about it face to face and take in people’s thoughts and past experience… So that is what I am doing.

Today I am going to work in the Avesta Research Centre because I have a video conference later today, so I am getting up a little later and taking it slow since I have been working until about 10 in the evening, and starting at about 5.30 in the morning (stupid backwards jetlag from Finland has messed up my body); plus, there isn’t much to do in the hotel I am staying in and I have a lot to learn and do while I am here.

Yesterday I was taken out for a kebab for my lunch - it was lovely! Just like I am used to in the UK, but bigger portions! I was also shown around the Avesta server room, and was geekily excited to see some of the servers I work on every day! I also enjoyed seeing the way they run their infrastructure - every day is a learning day, I saw their SANs and also a lot of blades, which has really reduced the need for needing a lot of space - they have also had a big push onto virtualisation which has reduced the amount of racks they need, so some of them were just empty.