Jason Powell - Church IT and Other Musings

Workshops Coming to GCC

 

Wondering about practical events where you get tools and training for your team? WiredChurches.com workshops are teacher-led, classroom-style, one-day events. Boring they are not. You'll hear from Granger leaders about what works and what doesn’t. Practicums are facilitator-led, round-table discussions. It’s the sit-down, roll-up-your-sleeves conversation you’re craving. Not quite a support group but an informal, safe place where you can share and gain ideas from others like you.

NEW! Events grouped into two-day chunks. Make the most of your travel...come for one day or stay for two. NEW! Everyone gathers together for a half hour of worship on both days before breaking into individual workshops and practicums.

Events happening Thursday and Friday, March 5-6, 2009

Thursday
• First Impressions [Keep guests coming back]
• Kids [Creating safe, fun space for kids]
• Less Clutter. Less Noise. [How to get the word out]
• Pop Goes The Church [Leveraging pop culture in your church]
• Student Ministry Practicum [Reaching students]
• Worship Leaders Practicum [Leading worship]

Friday
• NEW! Lasting Impressions [Keeping guests engaged & growing]
• Maximizing the Arts [Unleashing the arts]
• Simply Strategic Volunteers [Finding and keeping volunteers]
• Web Strategy [Strategies to build an effective Web site]
• Technical Arts Practicum [Using lighting, sound & media]

One-price: Pre-register to get $20 discount rate of $99 per person, per day. Includes materials and lunch. Where & When: Granger Community Church campus, 90 miles east of Chicago,
9 a.m.-4 p.m. Thursday and/or Friday, March 5-6, 2009.

My Blogging Frequency Diminished Due to IRC, Twitter and Life

Ah life ... it's been one of those extended seasons in my life where it seems no matter what I try I can't keep up.  Basically I'm living in a mode of the most critical stuff gets dealt with while all else fades into the background.  It's not pretty or efficient, but it's working well enough for now.  A number of you have emailed me various questions over the past few months ... I got your email ... I will reply ... it just won't be anytime soon ... sorry :-(

I've even stopped reading blogs for the past several weeks unless I get a ping via my google alerts ... aren't you curious what alerts I have setup? ;-)

I'm bummed I don't have more time/energy to be blogging more frequently, but I've found 2 outlets that feed my need to be "connected" with others in the church IT world ... IRC and Twitter.

IRC: Typically a few times each day I poke my nose into our Church IT Roundtable IRC channel ... it's basically an online chat room where a number of church IT staff and volunteers hang out.  Here I can catch up on the latest news, ask questions, give answers, and just get to know better my fellow IT peers.  A contributing factor in my recent hiring of Justin Moore was from being able to interact with and watch him interact with others in the channel almost daily since last winter.  You can learn a lot about a person by hanging out in a crowd together, even if that crowd happens to be virtual.

So I'd strongly encourage anyone involved in IT (yup, we have non-church IT guys/gals joining us as well) to get involved in this virtual community.  Together we can accomplish so much more! Here's a link you can bookmark that will take you to the chatroom with a single mouse click...nothing to install...that's about as easy as I can make it for you.

TWITTER:  I know a number of you think Twitter is stupid and pointless...I did...then I started seeing it's potential value.  And I'm happy to report it's return has been greater than I expected ... even moreso if you tie Twitter to your Facebook status (I rarely visit facebook anymore so this was a big plus).

So, I don't have/make time to create blog posts to keep those interested up to date on what we're doing IT wise at GCC.  I DO have the time to blast out quick 140 character updates throughout the day.  I've also asked for help via Twitter and gotten almost instant feedback ... even from vendors!  Now that's service!  I'm diggin' that 2 way instant interactive aspect of Twitter.

You can easily get overwhelmed by the amount of "noise" flowing back and forth in Twitter.  You have to determine what your acceptable signal to noise ratio.  My suggestion is to add people you "follow" slowly and strategically.  And no, you don't have to follow everyone that follows you.  I'm VERY selective in who I follow right now.  No offense to anyone if I'm not following you (yet), but I've only got so much space right now :-)

So while you wait for future blogs posts ... you may want to follow my Twitter.

There ya go ... Twitter and IRC make me feel like I'm still able to contribute to the IT community even if time is scarce and their reach is not near as great as the number of people subscribed to this blog.  There are other neat social aspects to of each of these as well, but I'm out of time for now to tell ya ...

New "improved" IDF webcam feed ...

GCC Rewired on UStream.tv

We were using EyeSpyFX to stream the webcam Friday and it was pretty sluggish.  Switched to UStream.tv last night and it's MUCH better ... even has audio.  http://www.ustream.tv/channel/daves-cam

 

 

Go sign up for an account and you can chat with us right there on the above site today (Saturday).

LIVE GCC Webcam of our continuing IDF overhaul

Starting at 5pm tonight we're going to continue overhauling this IDF at GCC.  Enjoy the live feed :-)

http://www.eyespyfx.mobi:8080/webcams/SnapShotBlog?id=83f93f1ec3791840a488e711bddde2ae&path=webcams

 

Here's also a bunch of pictures from last nights overhaul courtesy of Justin Moore ... we went home around 3am http://flickr.com/photos/wantmoore/sets/72157604066246771/

Network Unpleasantness Part III

I'm very pleased to report that we had an uneventful Easter weekend in IT ... things worked as expected although our credit card transactions are still laggy.

Today Ed and I spent about 5 hours talking about next steps for our network infrastructure.  Before hand I spent some time cleaning up my office and rearranging it a bit so we have more wall space for brainstorming ... time to get another 4x8 whiteboard for me crib :-)

A couple people left comments on my prior posts inquiring about our network diagram ... here's the basic IDF diagram in all it's whiteboard glory

We have 5 IDF's (aka wiring closets/rooms) ... we don't count our server room.  No, the "new IDF" is not really new anymore, it is the most recent though and is the future network core and server room.  Even our cat5e IDF ties are short enough that we get Gig to the desktop to everyone.

After chatting with Terry last week and Ed and I pondering on this over the weekend, here's what our dream scenario would look like

It includes putting a new HP 5406 + GBIC module in the new IDF which then frees up managed Dell 5324 switches to displace the remaining non-managed 2624's we had.  We'd add 2 new fiber runs and end up with fiber home runs from each switch back to the 5406.  The server rack gets 6 cat6 direct runs to the 5406 (only 4 are currently needed).  This would give us a fast fully managed switch environment and the shortest path from clients to servers ... and the big key is finally moving us to routable VLANs.  Problem is the price tag .. CHA-CHING!

So instead for the immediate future we'll put a 5406 in the new IDF, replace all 2624's with 5324's, run the straight server shots, and start adding lots of VLANs.  We'll work on the rest as time and budget allow.

So now to adding more VLANs ... we currently have 2.  We basically started with clean slate and started listing what devices or "unique" end users are attached to each IDF.  Then we started writing down what devices/users should be in their own VLAN for management, monitoring, security, performance, etc.  Then finally we started assigning IP ranges based on a few criteria to each VLAN group staying with the 10.10.X.X scheme (because that's my favorite).  By 5:30pm we had what we felt was a great draft to work from.

On paper we're going from 2 to 18 VLANs which will really carve up our traffic for much improved network performance and better monitoring/troubleshooting.  Now it's time to start getting bids on the HP 5406 so we can start work on this when we get back from the roundtable next week.