| Entry: | This is my first diary entry and the first diary entry on the new SQL Server system rather than on the old inidividual Access Data Forms.
Today is Tuesday. I arrived on Friday and started working properly on Saturday. The server was rescued from its box and got up and running. The UPS has died since I was here last year so it is now running from a much smaller device which should cover us for some small blips but probably not more than a minute or two. Also on Saturday I installed Microsoft SQL Server 2000 onto the server and copied on the database files I had brought with me which Mia has spent the last couple of months developing.
The next few days have largely involved getting all the other old machines out of their boxes, checking that they are alive (not always the case) and performing some quick health checks and upgrades (all machines have had office upgraded to Office Pro 2000 to meet the demands of the new database systems and have had extra system updates such as Anti Virus software and Database Access Components).
Shahina had managed to kill one machine when here setting up prior to the start of the season but this was worked around by stealing the PSU from another machine which was previously declared dead last year (its memory was also liberated to breathe a bit of extra life into Dan's survey machine).
There has also been a bit of work to network up various specialists machines. Fortunately this has proved much easier than last year as all I've looked at so far have been modern Windows XP machines with inbuilt network cards (last year much time was spent trying to network enable faded old windows 9x laptops).
There has also been a bit of database development work undertaken - though mostly by sending things to Mia! I have done some work on the conservation database (a more recent version of the access file was sitting on the server than we had to work on in London. Hopefully that is still the most recent version and there isn't another more up to date file anywhere else). Also this diary system has been imported into the SQL database - main change involved was changing the id field types to int and making the main one an 'identity' column.
Right - well I've bored you enough for now. Hopefully we should be getting some new kit from ibm at the end of the week so I shall report back then.
Cheers then…..Entered By: Richard May |
