Saturday, August 29, 2009

This is the life in Iraq

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

My Ever Loyal Buddies

Monday, August 24, 2009

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

IT Minimart

My Network in Baghdad

This is how it looks setting up a network in the middle of the desert.

We have two sat links. The bigger dish connects to an ISP in Austria(2 MBPS) and the smaller dish connects to the US(1.5 MBPS). This is a normal setup, say if one of the link goes down then you have the other link as backup. The thing with satellite links is that they are very very expensive. The link that connects to Austria costs 12,000 USD a month while the link that connects to the US costs 17,000 USD a month. Anyway Uncle Sam is paying for it :) . . . It's noticeable that the sat dish sits on top of a bunker.

This 6 foot trailer is the IT Room/Server Room . . . it contains the modems, routers, servers of the whole camp. It contains two AC units which makes 18 degrees celsius inside while its 47 degrees celsius outside . . .

There's a hole on the lower corner of the trailer in which cables from the whole camp passes through. If you notice the UTP cables just lay down on the ground on a pipe but still not that much protection. What I did was took 2 sand bags from the bunkers and dump it on top of the cables as an added protection. This kind of cabling already exist when we took over this camp:) . . . and that's my excuse. I don't wanna do a recabling again . . . besides it works!




HP Proliant ML350 with HP Data Protector Express as Tape Backup




Cisco Catalyst Switches and iDirect Satellite Modems


We've got 2 server racks. The taller rack contains 2 HP Proliant ML350 servers with Xeon processors, an Untangle box as firewall/gateway and another box for Anti Virus and Windows Update Server. The smaller rack contains Cisco Catalyst switches, another Untangle box and a file server for movies and TV series (right now its around 300 GB of data) . . . What can you do in the middle of the desert? . . . watch movies and downloaded TV series :) . . . We have a projector and loud speakers and that makes our night . . .


Monday, August 3, 2009

Transforming Vista into Windows VXP Hybrid

As we all know that Vista has a lot of issues so I am using this guide some sort of making Vista a little bit better by disabling those unwanted apps . . .