Full-time, part-time, and volunteer

When I was doing my pre-university programme in Malaysia, I spent my leisure time by reading a lot of motivational books. I still remember the first book I borrowed from my dad titled " Success is a choice" written by an American writer.

The hobby continued even after I further my studies in Degree in Computer Science. 

I also read self-development books when I have free time. And then when I graduated, I worked as a System Designer for an IT company. I was busy with company projects, and I found out I had less time to read books. 

So, I hardly found time to read books. I was so into reading quotes because it saved my time, rather than finding time to read the whole book to complete.

This is the best quote which I like most. 

“When you're young you have time and energy but no money. When you get older you have money and energy but no time. And later when you finally have time and money, you no longer have energy.”

And then, I come out with my own philosophy about life.

To be a successful person in his career, everyone needs to have full time, part-time and volunteer jobs.

1. Full time job 

When you are in 20's, you must have at least one skill which you are very good in. Some people call it as profession. Find a job which requires professional and technical skills. Example of professional jobs are doctors, architect, accountant, mechanic, businessman, engineer, and interior designer. You will pay your house rental, car monthly installment, electricity, phone bills, food and drinks by using the money you get from the salary. I work as engineer specialize in High performance computing and servers. So far, this full time job is the only work that I get highly-paid as compared to my previous jobs that I have done. I have Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science (majoring in Computer Systems) and I  already worked in this industry for 5 years and I never quit from this field. I specialized in supercomputers, servers and IT infrastructure, but I do not have professional skills in computer hacking, software developer and IT gadgets.

2. Part time job

You cannot 100% depend on your full time job for the whole of your life. As you grow older, you will have no time and energy. Everyone should have hobbies and interests. Part time job is what you do for the sake of  finding extra money to support your expenses paid monthly. You must do part time job based on your free time left, and you do it for fun which matches your interests. Examples of part time jobs are tuition teacher, baking cake & cookies, working at restaurant during weekend, selling paintings, data entry, promoter and many more. Even I'm an IT engineer, it does not mean that I have so much money. Therefore I must also find extra money to cover the monthly car installment and house rental.  I like acting, modelling, and travelling. So, I do part time modelling and acting, and writing a blog an article on magazine, be a tour guide to foreigners during my free time. The best part doing part time job is you do it , you get paid, and you enjoy it. There are so many part time job website on the internet, and why not you just give it a try to apply for one. But, please remember that your only intention to get part time job is getting extra income, not more than your full time job, and do not spend so much time on this compared to your full time job. 

3. Volunteer job

As you grow older and older, you will find yourself less interested on your daily professional career and part time jobs, even though the pay is good. God does not create a human living alone. We need to live in a harmony group. Everyone should have healthy social life. You must also spend your time with social activities related to humanity and religion. During my free time on the weekends, I volunteer myself to non-profit organization programme and activities such as Aman Palestin and couchsurfing.

Working as an IT Engineer for 5 years

 Today is my 5th year of becoming an IT Engineer! There are 3 job positions that I hold in 5 years of working experience and there are also few private and government agencies projects that I participated in.


Grid Computing / Linux Server Support Engineer

• Serves as an escalation from Level 2 server support in MIMOS Berhad.

• Perform complex Linux systems administration tasks in a virtualized hosting environment

• Troubleshoots, configures, and tunes systems. Installs software, patches, upgrades, applications within SLA/escalation guidelines

• Fulfill provisioning orders for new cloud servers and perform website and application migrations on new and existing cloud servers

• Resolve technical and logical support inquiries via phone, chat, and tickets

• Script automation tools to make work faster and more accurate

• Continually identify efficiencies for systems, processes and procedures

• Perform other various duties as assigned

• Installing, configuring, troubleshooting, testing, and managing over 1000 virtual machines by using VMware products, KVM (libvirt)

• Handling user incident problems by using Marvel Software Ltd ticketing system, dedicated to delivering the best ITIL/ISO compliant ITSM software to its client.

• Assisting Software Development and Central Engineering department in improving existing server inventory listing by suing several programming languages such as PHP and Linux Bash Scripting.

• Install, configuring, troubleshooting, testing operating systems such as Redhat , CentOS, Ubuntu, SuSE Linux Enterprise Server, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008.

• Monitoring servers by using monitoring tools such Cacti, Nagios, Xymon. 

• Performing daily check up on physical servers in data center, provide technical support for hardware maintenance, making log case to hardware supplier, contractor or vendor for hardware replacement such as SGI, Hewlett Packard, Dell, Sun Microsystems, IBM.

• Configuring HP integrated Lights Out (iLO3) for HP servers for system administrators to remote access and server monitoring.

Systems Engineer
• Installing, configuring, troubleshooting, testing and on-site support for most Linux-based operating systems such as RHEL, SLES, OpenSuSE, CentOS, Ubuntu, Fedora, Knoppix, and Solaris.
• Contribute 90% of total research and development of total company projects in dealing with bioinformatics application.
•    Experience in installing and configuring supercomputer with capabilities more than 120 CPUs and 1TB
memory, and cluster with 40 nodes.
• Enhancing system performance by configuring load balancing, network bonding, RAID setup, server virtualization, LVM.
•    Installing, configuring and managing Email server for a research institute with 100 users.
• Conducting Linux System Administration Training and open source tools for more than 100 people from government agencies and private sectors.
• Assisting technical team on physical installation for servers, storage, tape library, network cabling, Fiber channel, SAS cable, rack mounting, and hardware spare parts.
• Troubleshooting hardware and software failures and provide on-site technical support for company’s clients.
• Managing IT infrastructure and user management for the company (workstation, servers, web, Mediawiki, Samba, NFS, NIS, LDAP, VPN, DNS, VNC, router, access point, modem, printer server).

System Designer

•    Designing and developing web-based application by using J2EE, Java, and Oracle database.
•    Participating in user-requirement study, assisting in the preparation of requirement specifications in accordance to users’ needs.
•    Implementing Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)
•    Provide production support and resolve issues for company’s clients.

Training Attendence
•    Attend Knowledge Grid Forum 2009
•    Attend SuSE Studio Training 2009
•    Attend online Training of ScaleMP product 2010
•    Attend short training of Storage EMC VNX and VNXe 2011


Achievement and Project involvement
Asiatic Centre of Genome Technology (ACGT) Sdn. Bhd
•    Installing and configuring Rocks Clusters (Linux distribution) for high performance computing
Cluster for Bioinformatics operation purposes.

Flexcale Systems Sdn Bhd.’s office operation setup
• Installing and maintaining VMware ESXi server and VMware Server, configuring DNS settings, Installing and configuring mail server (Zimbra).

Jabatan Alam Sekitar
• Installation, configuration and testing of VMware Esxi, CentOS, Load Balancing with Balance, DRBD, Heartbeat, MySQL .

Ministry of Agriculture (MOA)
•    Installation and testing for SuSE operating system and Database MySQL.

Toll Group
• Corrective maintenance of Linux OS Server (CentOS 5), Troubleshooting, Installation of components/ softwares (Webmin, VNC), troubleshooting sendmail.

Flexcale Systems Sdn. Bhd.’s Research and Development
•    Research and development of Quota and Traffic Bandwidth Manager to manage user internet
access speed control.


Malaysia Genome Institute (MGI)
•    Deliver, installation, configuration, testing, and commissioning project for Openfiler Operating
System for NAS server
•    Setup RAID-0 for 3.5Terabytes Storage.
•    Configuring Quota Management for users in NAS Server

Jabatan Alam Sekitar (JAS)
• Conducting training of VMware ESXi, Introduction to Linux, MySQL for government servants at department of Jabatan Alam Sekitar.

Jabatan Meteorologi Malaysia (JMM)
•    Setup RAID-5 hardware level
•    Deliver, installation, configuration, testing, and commissioning project for NFS server.

Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, UTM
• Setup RAID-1 hardware level for Application Server (CentOS 5.4), setup RAID-5 hardware level for Database server (CentOS 5.4), configuring NFS server and client.

Malaysia Genome Institute (MGI)
•    Upgrading existing Rocks Clusters, Installation of Bio informatics software (Blast, Mira, Fasta,
Artemis, Gromacs, Crossmatch, Emboss, Bioperl Iprscan, Stackpack),  Installation of Redhat 7.3 server , Setup DNS server (dnsmasq),  Installation and configuring Zimbra Network Edition Mail Server

Asiatic Centre of Genome Technology Sd. Bhd (ACGT)
•    Cloning Disk image for High Performance Computing server using Live CD and Ghost for Linux
(G4L).

Malaysian Nuclear Agency (MINT)
•    Installing and configuring Rocks Clusters. Installation of Sun Server product (Sun Fire X4140)  .
Sun StorageTek Installation and Configuration by using Common  Array Manager. Install MPI- based software (MCNP)

Sekolah kejuteraan Teknologi Maklumat, Universiti Malaysia Sabah (UMS)
•    Deliver, installation, configuration, testing, and commissioning project for High Performance
Computing Rocks Clusters (Linux distribution) for high performance computing Cluster

Forest Research Institute Malaysia (FRIM)
•    Deliver, installation, configuration, and testing for ScaleMP, RHEL, Bioinformatics softwares
(Blast, TCoffee, Perl, Emboss, Clustalw, Hmmer, Fasta, Glimmer, Cap3 & Pcap, Mr Bayes, Phylip, Staden Package, Biopython, Velvet, Samtools, Maq, Bowtie, Act, Oases, Bioperl, GeneMark, SSR Finder Module, CLCBio Workbench)
Jabatan Meteorologi Malaysia (JMM)
•    Upgrading existing storage system using Dell Powervault MD1000 and MD1000. (up to 25TB
each server )

Malaysian Centre for Geospatial Data Infrastructure (MACGDI)
•    Data collecting for research purpose on server CPU performance and user accessibility rate by
using VMware capacity planner.

Malaysian Palm oil Board (MPOB)
•    Database migration from Informix to MySQL server.
•    Conducting MySQL training to MPOB staffs

Forest Research Institute Malaysia (FRIM)
   Conducting training  “Introduction to Linux” to FRIM researchers


Malaysian Palm oil Board (MPOB)
•    Deliver, installation, configuration, testing of RHEL and VMware server for SISPEN (IT
department )

Asiatic Centre of Genome Technology (ACGT) Sdn. Bhd.
•    Installing and configuring Rocks Clusters (Linux distribution) for high performance computing
Cluster for Disaster Recovery server

Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, UTM
•    Installing Intel Fortran® Composer XE 2011 compiler for server.

Malaysian Nuclear Agency (MINT)
•    Deliver, installation, configuration, testing, and commissioning project for MCNPX on Sun
Microsystems server..

Malaysian Palm Oil Board (MPOB)
•    Migrating database from Informix DB to MySQL.
•    Deliver, installation, configuration, testing, and commissioning project for MySQL server and server.
•    Editing Power Builder script at MPOB Hulupaka station
Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, UTM
•    Deliver, installation, configuration, testing, and commissioning NFS server and database server.

Malaysia Genome Institute
•    Upgrading HPC server (Rock clusters) and installing bioinformatics tools

National Hydraulic Research Institute of Malaysia (NAHRIM)
• Deliver, installation, configuration, testing, and commissioning project for High Performance Computing, Back up server, storage server, tape library, HPC resource manager, and HPC performance monitoring. Tools.

Universiti Malaya Faculty of Dentistry (UMFD)
•    Deliver, installation, configuration, testing, and commissioning project for High Performance
Computing, NFS Back up server.

Top 25 Free Online Resources In Computer Science

According to efytimes.com, here the 25 best online websites that can assist you in strengthening your fundamentals in Computer Science :-


1. MIT OpenCourseWare: 
This has the widest collection of open courseware along with a number of offerings in computer science from some of the pioneers in the field.

2. Stanford Engineering Everywhere: 
You can opt for online courses in basic computer science, artificial intelligence, linear systems along with other engineering topics here.

3. Academic Earth: 
This site has over 12 free lectures on computer science from renowned colleges like Stanford, MIT, and Berkeley.

4. MIT World: 
This site offers lectures, conferences, and demonstrations on a wide range of topics, including computer science.

5. Harvard Extension School: 
This provides access to some of the free Ivy League educational resources collecting course materials from a host of different computer science courses having been held over the past years.

6. UC Berkeley Engineering: 
You can look into UC Berkeley’s iTunesU archive for an amazing collection of computer science and engineering lectures.

7. The Open University: 
This is a great place to search for free educational resources on any topic with a good amount of computer science material too.

8. UC Irvine: 
By using UC Irvine’s online resources, you can get intro to AI, Machine Learning, Kernel-Based Learning, or Bayesian Statistical Analysis.

9. w3schools : 
The site has tutorials to learn HTML, CSS, AJAX, and a number of other programming languages.

10. Wikibooks: 
This site helps you in supplementing any of the courses undertaken by you for free online with the help of textbooks from Wikibooks.

11. Google Code University: 
This has a host of resources to assist computer science students with courses on programming, web security, algorithms, and a lot more.

12. ArsDigita: 
This is based on the undergrad computer science program at MIT and offers good courses worth checking out.

13. Grinnell College:
 You can find a number of computer science classes taught at Grinnell between 1997 and to date over here.

14. Codeacademy : 
For assistance in learning a coding language, you can check out this site for guidance to make everything easier.

15. Swinburne University of Technology: 
This is an Australian school offering free courses on topics including HTML, web graphics, higher level math, Java, and much more.

16. iTunesU: 
You can search for computer science for locating over hundreds of lectures on the subject to opt from.

17. UMass Boston: 
For acquiring skills about artificial intelligence, one can go to UMass-Boston’s OCW site for free course materials.

18. Udacity:
 This was started by a professor at Stanford and is an essential resource for any CS student offering courses in cryptography, web application engineering, computer program design, programming languages, including programming robotic cars.

19. Caltech: 
You can get sample what computer science classes are like over here tuition-free, for a limited time.

20. Sofia: 
On this site you can opt for a course in Java programming, Macromedia Flash, statistics, network security, or webpage authoring.

21. Carnegie Mellon OpenLearning Initiative: 
At this time, it only offers a few CS-related courses, but plan to add more over the years.

22. University of Notre Dame OCW: 
The two notable courses in computer science here are Applied Multimedia Technology and Applied Multimedia.

23. Saylor.org: 
This is an introductory course in computer science utilizing great free resources on the site.

24. Khan Academy: 
This site offers a number of courses covering topics like Fibonacci functions, Python programming, and binary numbers.

25. Higher Computing for Everyone: 
The site offers a course in writing basic programs. It is a great introduction for anybody entering programming.

How to upgrade Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition to Enterprise

Below are the steps on how to upgrade Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition to Enterprise :-

1) Run the server as normal. Click Start. Right Click "Computer".

2) Load Windows Server 2008 R2 DVD. Double click the icon.

3) Double click the icon setup.exe.

4) Run Install now.

5) Click on "Do not install the latest updates for the installation."

6)  Choose "Windows Server R2 Enterprise (Full Installation)"

7) Tick "accept the license terms" and click Next.

8) Click Upgrade

9) Click "Next".

10) Let it run.....

11) After it has successfully rebooted, check the Operating System now.

Eureka! You have successfully upgraded to Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard to Enterprise. :-)

Common Computer Related Queries Resolved

Good day to all readers, thank you for continue reading my blog. Even though, I'm an IT Engineer but I do not consider myself as an IT expert who knows everything about computers!  I deal with computer servers, but I do not fix laptop, if you ask me in details about laptop, I might not answer all of your questions. Hehe. Technically, I'm a laptop user for more than 5 years and I had so many questions to ask about computer and laptop. Eventually, I just forget about it, but the information posted by OpenSourceForYou on their facebook page has caught my attention which answered the questions I always wanted to asked earlier.

Thanks to efytimes website which provides information about this. This website tells you the top 10 common computer-related question that most people often ask. Therefore, I repost what stated on the website which might beneficial to you. :-)

 Below are the top 10 common related questions about computers:-

1. How to maintain your laptop's battery in good health?
There is a lot of debate regarding how long you should charge your batteries. As many of your gadgets run on Lithium Ion batteries, they can be taken care of quite easily. These batteries perform best when doing shallow discharges, keeping them cool, not leaving them plugged while it is running at 100 per cent battery.

2. What do viruses, trojans, and other malware actually do?
Viruses are known as programs that copy themselves infecting a computer, spreading from one to another real life virus. Alternatively, trojans are applications that may seem normal but have a code that performs like someone else is controlling your computer.

3. What's wrong with using public Wi-Fi?
Public Wi-Fi networks come with a lot of problems, in particular, they are very insecure. It does not keep you safe from other people on the network even if you have a password. It is simple for anyone to see what you are doing and steal personal information or passwords.

4. Why do you need to "eject" USB drives?
Computers utilise a certain thing known as write caching for improving performance. Whenever you copy something to your drive, your computer will generate a message that it has completed the task but it’s actually waiting for some other tasks to perform so all of them can be done together. Once you press eject, it completes any task in the queue to ensure that you don't take it out before it's complete.

5. How can you identify an email as spam?
Most spams are obvious as they come with messages like "I lost 30 pounds and made $24356 in five hours by taking this special pill!", but there are others that are subtle. Many rely on "phishing," where a spammer will make their email appear as it's coming from a valid source. It may ask you to click on a link that appears to seem it’s going to paypal.com, but goes to their PayPal-disguised site where you type in your personal information.

6. Why are cables so expensive?
When purchasing a HDMI cable for your Blu-Ray player, you can opt for simpler and cost effective cables. A cable from Monoprice will perform in an efficient manner so no point investing money on an expensive one. You can even buy refurbished and not go for the extended warranty to save extra money.

7. What happens when a site you are using gets hacked?
Whenever a site gets hacked, the hackers try to get your username and password and it depends on how a site stores your password, along with your password's strength. You must protect yourself with a good password manager and a different strong password for every site you use.

8. Why do you need to keep resetting my router?
If you encounter Internet issues, it is best to unplug your router and plug it back in, you will see that it starts working again. There are a number of things that could lead to this issue, it could be overheating, becoming slow due to heavy traffic (like BitTorrent). There are many things you can do to fix the problem. You must wait a complete 10 seconds before unplugging your router.

9. Will you get caught if you download a movie on BitTorrent?
Your internet provider might monitor your traffic to check if you are torrenting. The legal repercussions of it are not so heavy as earlier, but may lead to getting letters from your ISP, throttled speeds, or other punishments.

10. Do you really need to care about your online privacy?
It is an obvious fact that it is a bad thing if somebody steals your password or credit card information, but more people are not cautious about what they put on Facebook, their personal blog, or anywhere else. You must protect your personal data as it gives companies and governments more power to track you, and it can make it easier for anyone to steal your identity even if it may not seem like it.


Good luck and have a nice day working with your computers!

5 ways to become a successful System Administrator

I have total of 5 years of working experience as an IT Engineer. I do not consider myself as a very successful engineer, but I would like to share my experience with you guys. For successful system administration, you need more than just the required technical skills. Below is a list of five slightly non-technical abilities that should be developed in order to become the best system admin ever.

Working with servers and network cables in the data centre

1. Monitor, measure, and record.
Yes, you know what the swap usage is today because there’s a problem with the disks thrashing and it’s causing the server to go slow. But your users are complaining to management that it’s an ongoing issue and now management is asking you for data. What, you haven’t been documenting this, so it’s now your word against Sales and Marketing? Guess who wins that argument by default? You’re responsible for the system, so they will make this your problem. So get/build/buy a system to monitor, measure, and record that data so you can build pretty power-point slides for finance next time you need to ask for hardware upgrades, or to prove that the issues are caused by bad software rather than your perfectly functioning servers. Even if you are just running a single server for an employer, a client, or even yourself, it’s good data to have for some unforeseen reason someday.

A shortlist of things to start monitoring/recording/charting/graphing:

Load average
Memory usage
Disk I/O (transactions per second)
Network throughput (in Mbits/sec)
Network throughput per virtual host/site
Transfer (in GB/month)
Transfer per virtual host
Disk storage (monthly in GB) and also daily rolling average if files are uploaded and deleted regularly)
Average response time of test URI under your control (in milliseconds)
Average response time of a PHP (or Ruby/Python/etc.) page under your control that does not change. Testing real web pages gives you a consistent baseline that you can use to narrow the problem to the server, the OS, or the web code itself.
SSH logins per day/month by user and IP address
Anything you feel is necessary, or will get questions on later
Once you have consistent information, you’ll start seeing patterns and can look for things out of the ordinary. It’s also good for correlating data to behaviors when you’re troubleshooting issues and aren’t sure where to start.

I was conducting a training to government staffs

2. Develop project management habits.
Even for small, one-person projects. Write up a small scope of work, write requirements, get sign-off from stakeholders on their expectations, plan a schedule, and record your activities. Write up a postmortem document at the end. Even if it’s just for yourself. It doesn’t have to be fancy, and it certainly doesn’t have to be formal PMBoK activities.

It may seem bureaucratic managing all that paper and it may seem like you’re spending more time on paperwork than sysadminning, but it helps keep you organized when your boss hands you random high-priority assignment that strays you from your task. It’s also handy when you build a new system and users complain that it doesn’t do what they wanted it to do. See? You got their sign-off on the requirements document right there…

Even if it’s just for yourself, one day you’ll ask yourself, “now why on earth did I install Acme::Phlegethoth on this server? Oh yeah, it was for that weird commune who needs it for their application code…”

3. Develop a system for day-to-day work.
Again, this may seem bureaucratic, but if you spend your days just “doing stuff” without a To-Do list, you may find it difficult to explain to your boss next week exactly what you’ve been doing with your time. I’ve become a fan of Kanban boards lately because it’s a visual device that your boss (or anyone who assigns you work) can interact with. Let’s say I’ve got three items I plan to work on today that should fill up my 8 hours. “Oh, you need me work on this other item instead?


Yes sir! Here is what I planned to work on today. Which one should I deprioritize in favor of this one? Oh, so it’s more important than this one, but not as important as these two? That’s fine, I can requeue that lower priority one and get to it later.” This helps set expectations. I know of one graphic designer who used it to coordinate her work between three competing project managers. If one asked her to prioritize something, she’d show him her board and send him to the other project managers to negotiate the conflict and coordinate their deadlines. Even if no one else looks at your board but you, it helps to keep you organized.

I was presenting MySQL database training Jabatan Alam Sekitar IT team

4. Develop communications skills (sales, presentation, etc)
It took me a while to really understand why this is important. Yes, today you just want to sit in a server room, keep things running, and look at Lolcats. But tomorrow, you may have other people assisting (or working for) you. You need to be able to communicate expectations. You need to propose and advocate your ideas (great ideas never stand on their own merit unless and until they are properly communicated), to your peers or to management.

Maybe you need to convince someone that they need to upgrade the web server. Maybe you need to explain your new server proposal that will fix all their problems. Maybe you need to convince the developer that his code is really causing those memory leaks, but you need to present it in a non-accusatory manner. I’m personally a big fan of Toastmasters for this, as it’s the cheapest and most effective way to improve your ability to communicate.

Doing back up for High Performance Computing at Malaysian Genome Institute 

5. Start preparing for “what if” scenarios.
Your servers will crash. Your servers will be hax0r3d. Your backups will be corrupted. So start figuring out how to react when that happens. One of the unhappiest days of my life was when my personal server was r00t3d. I did all the right things, but the attackers were more dedicated to getting in than I was in keeping them out. How do you remove a rootkit after it’s discovered? I didn’t know then, because I never asked the question (remember? I thought I did all the right things to prevent it in the first place). You can bet I certainly know now! What happens when the server dropped off the network because of a power outage, and now it’s saying “kernel not found”?


What happens when your client or internal user asks for you to restore a backup, and the backup is corrupted? You may not get all the answers to these until you actually experience them first-hand, but it’s better to start asking the questions now and not when you have angry people yelling at you. Also, once you start asking the questions, you can start setting up “self-training” scenarios to test it. Set up a test box and remove the kernel. See if you can get it back to operational. Try and get someone to install a rootkit on it, or at least do a bunch of stuff that you have to troubleshoot and fix. By asking these questions now, you’ll be in a much better position to deal with them later.