Day 4

Slept right through until my alarm today (6.30am); first time since arriving. Skype with Jodie before a quick breakfast, shower and out the door to the bus stop. Only had to wait about 5 minutes for the bus to arrive. 5 minutes to the train station, then about another 5 minutes walk to the office. Picked my lunch from the menu at reception – luckily Jan arrived at the same time so he helped with the translation of the menu. I picked what he described as ‘meat and potatoes’.

Spent the first hour re-doing my profile after joining the AD domain. Phone conference with Pat Dix (IT Manager, South Africa) to discuss a number of items. Two issues for me to follow up regarding their Exchange migration, which is only half finished. They have a need to keep a copy of every email sent and received from all SA mailboxes. Given he won’t have access to the Exchange server once his user accounts are migrated we need to come up with an automated solution. The other issue is that they currently use a linux based mail filtering software called ‘MailScanner’. This software quarantines any incoming mail with ‘suspicious’ attachments (mp3, avi, wav etc). The user is sent an email advising of this and IT can ‘release’ emails if requested. Need to find out if this functionality be replicated by ATT Secure Email Gateway? If so, to what degree?

Phone conference with Volvo IT to go over current open issues. About 15 issues currently outstanding.

Lunch was pretty good – it was indeed meat and potatoes. Boiled potatoes (they really seem to like those) and a fist-sized ‘meatball’ in a kind of gravy. The meat reminded me a bit of meatloaf, without the peas etc. Found out they pay about 5 Euros a day for lunch at the canteen. Not sure if this is good value – might be paying a bit for the convenience. They only get 30 minutes for lunch so not much time to go out and eat…

Spent the afternoon with Magnus Roos. He used to be part of the SSC team in EMEA but left the company about 3 months ago and is now working as a contractor. His area of expertise was AD and Exchange. Went over the structure of AD.global and know understand the security group set up a bit better. Sorted out an issue we’ve had with Exmerge in the new domain. Turns out you need to use an account that is a member of the ‘MailboxRights’ and ‘ViewOnly’ groups and IS NOT a member of the Domain Admins group. Tested with the ‘exmerge’ user account and confirmed that it was working. Discussed ‘single sign on’ for Keypoint. Seems like this is going to be one of my tasks while I’m here. Does not look to be a walk in the park. Aim will be to come up with a workable solution and submit it for approval – not to actually implement it (which is good).

Started snowing before lunch. Started light but got heavier as the afternoon wore on. Wind picked up as well, not looking forward to walking to the station. Luckily Magnus offered to drop me off. Picked up an onion, some face wash and a 1.5 litre bottle of water (for my cordial) before catching the bus home.

Cooked chilli con carne for dinner. Decided to use the rest of the Dolmio sauce in place of tomato puree. Came up pretty good - froze the left over chilli for later.