Author: Alexander Mamchenkov

HP rack building experience

Yesterday I had a nice experience of building the HP rack. I used to build custom racks with different hardware inside before and I would say it is not a very easy task. This is not to said about HP racks, especially when all the hardware to be in the rack is from HP as well. Actually, I didn\’t need to use a screw driver a lot, only in certain places (like removing the cover from the server to convert it from tower to rack mountable). Everything is fixed with locks, but not screws, everything matches the place perfectly. I really enjoyed the experience.

The only problem was faced is that I didn\’t have a conversion kits for old ML350 servers (G2 and T01) so I had to drill the wholes in the part of the rails of the conversion kit for G4 to be able to attach them to the old machines. I am glad that HP guys haven\’t seen me when I was drilling the rails (they would cry). I had no other choice, sorry guys :)

GSM and satellite for vessels

Doing a nice project for vessels communication. I was looking into different problems, solutions, equipment sets and so on and finally I have finished with one installation with Thrane & Thrane Fleet 33 for satellite and Ericsson GSM modem along side.

The idea is that the vessel spends most of the time near the shore in the coverage of GSM and from time to time crosses the Mediterranean see. So when vessel is nearby, it uses usual dialup (speed 9.6 at a cost of CYP ~0.04) and when it is out, it is using Fleet (speed 9.6 at a cost of CYP ~0.60).
Everyone seems to be happy now. I really enjoyed doing this project since I learned a lot of stuff about communication on vessels as well as about vessels as a whole.

Week holidays with friend from Russia

This week I had a friend of mine from Russia visiting me. We used to live next to each other when I was in Russia and since I have left it, I haven\’t seen him.

He was trying to come here for a long time and this time he managed to. We\’ve been to some nice places in Cyprus including Paphos Mosaic. We spend a lot of time here and we have did a lot of photos (he has a digital camera). Hopefully I will upload them to the web some day.

Anyhow, he has just left back to Russia. We had a very good time and now I feel very good and refreshed. Hopefully he will come to Cyprus again in some time.