Starting Apprenticeship

During the opening month of my Apprenticeship I spend time with all the departments, seeing how they worked together and what their main responsibilities where. The first department I spent time with was the Helpdesk, who are responsible for being the first point of contact for staff and students and whose job it is to fix minor problems and report major ones to the engineers. Following this, I spent some time with the networking department who oversee the running of the entire campus network, which includes campuses in Southend and Loughton. I then spent time with the Audio Visual Media Service team who are in charge of the projectors, videos and who also loan out and collect av equipment, as well as being responsible for recording certain lectures. Finally I was able to spent time with the engineering department, who fix all reported and unreported problems and who also setup and install any new pcs whenever they are required.

I am currently in the Engineering department, and I enjoy being able to get out and fix problems both in the workshop and on campus. I feel I have gained many skills in the few weeks I have been here, and am confident I will continue to do so. Some of the tasks I have achieved so far are:

– Setting up and installing Ubuntu Server, a linux server which I use to test various tools on

– Setting up a VMWare esxi, a virtualisation platform with which I was able to install 3 virtual environments onto one

physical machine

– Setting up system monitoring tools on my main workstation to track things like cpu temperature, network traffic, cpu and ram utilisation and so on

– Installing Apache webserver, MySQL server and PHP onto the ubuntu server

– Remote Administration using Dameware, Microsoft Remote Desktop, Telnet and SSH

– Setting up and hosting my own website and blog (although I can’t anymore as my home server is out of action)

– Installing network monitoring tools such as MRTG and Cacti on the Ubuntu Server

Next I plan to research and learn about various network monitoring tools, how to better use wordpress and what other remote administration options are available, as well as learning more at work about how to fix different problems.