Project 1 objective
Jaco Oil has business in various markets. The market I was involved in was their vast network of gas convenience stores, Fastrip. The mission was to modernize and streamline our extensive network infrastructure. Prior to this upgrade, the backbone of the infrastructure was mostly legacy equipment and called for an overhaul.
During this upgrade, I successfully configured 20 servers, each equipped with type 1 virtual machines (Bare metal virtual machines). These VM's ran Pfsense and Ubuntu software, ensuring great security insights into the network and an environment to process transactions. Additionally, I configured fortinet switches and Wifi access points to facilitate and segment various network devices.
My role demanded a solid understanding of computer networking as security and proper communication is of prime importance. Before implementation, the server and devices were validated and tested in a lab environment. This validation step ensured our point of sale system was able to gather transaction data, access our local area network and external wide area network. This approach ensures that Jaco Oil remains up to date in current technologies and facilitates trouble shooting.
Project 2 objective
Fastrip employees are encouraged to submit their own gas prices to keep a historical record of Fastrip prices. Employees submit through a portal but this is often missed in the midst of work.
Any Fastrip employee can submit their own prices from Fastrip and a feature request was made to ensure that Fastrip prices are submitted on time in order to keep a clean record of our prices. I was tasked with ensuring that when our prices are submitted, an email outlining the prices submitted was sent to the site. This would ensure that managers are on top and can confirm when prices are submitted.
The flow chart above depicts the various stages of the project and includes a legend. The names of tables and databases have been obfuscated.This project was successful and ensures gas prices are collected and with certainty, notify managers of this.
Conclusions
During this internship I learned a great deal about virtual machines on the ProxMox platform. I learned about database systems in a production environment and the main takeaway was networks. Networks can be a challenging topic to grasp because many of the concepts, like in computer science, are abstract in the sense that you are not able to see the flow of data with your eyes, but rather on a screen and you have to trust that the protocols work as intended.