Jason Powell - Church IT and Other Musings

My future IT career started here...

This is so awesome!  The Commodore 64 RETURNS!!!  The Commodore 64 DTV

I must have one now...I just showed this to my wife and asked her to check the stores for one tomorrow :-)

Ok, after googling I see this has been out since December so now you now I don't get out much..doh!  I remember wanting a C64 so bad...and begging my parents for one for Christmas.  In 8th grade I took a programming "activity" using Radio Shack TRS-80's...which we loving called "trash-80's" and totally loved it.  In high school I took all the programming classes offered...which I believe there were only two half-year classes.  Here we had the dual 5 1/4 floppy drive trash-80 model III's ... dual drives baaaabeeee!!  Although I wanted a C64 I figured there was no way my parents could afford one...heck, our house didn't even have a furnace just a big wood stove...and yes Indiana is COLD in the winter.  Was I ever surprised when I got one for Christmas...man, it's gonna drive me nuts until I can remember what year that would have been.  Anyways, I hooked it up to an OLD 12 inch black-n-white TV and I was lovin' life.  I can easily recall sitting in my room with my coat on...not only did we have no furnace but this was a 100 year old drafty farm house...reading the manual and trying different things.  I must have gotten it around 10th or 11th grade because I remember talking about the game Pirates (which was just re-made for Windows and was listed as a top game of 2004 by Time Magazine) which came out not longer after I got the C64.  Now looking back, this was also when I became involved in software piracy as my friends would give me copies of their games...opps.  Ahhh, the memories are flowing back now.  Anyone else remember S.A.M?  Many a laugh came from making it say something goofy.  There was a GUI word processor that came with my C64 too...GEOS something or other?  I also evenually got a thermal printer...man what a pain that thing was.    My senior government teacher finally told me I couldn't turn in any more assignments on thermal paper since it kinda curled up and was a little smaller than normal paper...geesh dude, give a kid a break.

At any rate, I was just thinking the other day about what exactly started me on the path towards IT...and totally forgot about my C64.  That's it.  Looking back I know that was the catalyst.  So Mom/Dad when you read this...isn't it so incredible that your sacrifice so many years ago is what started me on the path to my current role at GCC!  Wow, that's so cool to think about.  Hmm, think God had anything to do with that ;-)

OK ... I know I was not the only C64 "geek-in-the-making" out there.  Post your C64 stories...and what were your favorite games?

We all live in a...

... Yellow Machine?
Check out this kewl new multifunction NAS called Yellow Machine ... I love it when companies have fun/interesting names for their devices :-)  Though HotBrick is still my current favorite named product.

1.6TB - raid 0/1/5, Linux OS with web GUI, 8port switch, WAN gateway/router, Firewall and Proxy, pained all yellow and is as big as a toaster.

Talk about your network swiss army knife like device.  I emailed the company for pricing info, but haven't heard back yet.  If the price is right this could be a great first step for churches that don't yet have a server on site.

UPDATE:
Finally got pricing info on the Yellow Machine ... the email stated they have been swamped with inquiries ... apparently I'm not the only person that thinks this is a slick device.
A 1-TeraByte configuration (4 Seagate 250GB drives w/ Raid 5) has an MSRP of $1,595.  I'd wager the street price will be around $1400.  Considering the 4 drives alone would cost $650 and all the features this baby has ... that's a pretty sweet deal.  For churches without a server this is definitely something to look into.  Get your data onto some redundancy!  Most of the churches coming to our LiveWire workshops indicate they don't have a server and typically have no backups...YIKES!  I'll comment on diaster recovery in an upcoming post.

HotBrick...comin' through!

We're in the middle of implementing the Fellowship One church management system (which BTW rocks!) at GCC.  Being that it's ASP and therefore all hosted offsite I've been looking into implementing some sort of internet failover ... given that there's lots of construction in our area I'm just waiting for someone to get backhoe "happy" and leave us without our T1.  So we're in the process of getting WiFi broadband installed (3Mbit claimed) to give us internet failover with the added plus of more bandwidth...you can never have enough bandwidth.  We assumed ISA2004 would be able to handle load balancing two WAN connections...much to our disgust no dice.  You need expensive 3rd party software to make ISA2004 load balance...grrr...thanks Microsoft.  So Ed has been researching hardware solutions under $1000 for a few weeks and landed on a sweet solution from Hot Brick.  Not only is the name kewl, but the reviews and price point for their devices are great.  For a hair under $400 we got the HotBrick Firewall VPN 800/2 which has 2 WAN connections with auto failover and load balancing, 8 LAN connections for DMZ's and such, VPN, sweet firewall with stateful packet inspection, web based GUI, and other goodies.  One of their tech guys verified it could handle 250 simultaneous connections provided there were no VPN sessions ... which is fine as we'll pass VPN traffic through the HotBrick to ISA.  I'm pumped...not only will we have internet failover and load balancing, but we'll also have a dual layer firewall which has been on our to-do list for a year.  I'll post a review once we've played with it for a while.  FWIW, we found no other "enterprise" level dual WAN devices for under $1000...most were several thousand!

High Availability?

During lunch today Ed (my Network Admin) and I were talking shop and I mentioned that I see a time coming soon when we'll need to shift our work hours one day a week to something like 1-9pm or 2-10pm.  We're reaching a point where taking any of the servers offline during normal working hours just isn't something ends users should need to deal with.  Like most churches, our staff is cranking at 100+% and being told they can't do X because we're rebooting a server or testing something ... well, frankly they deserve better than that.
So discussion then turned to high availability ... what does it take to pull off some level of fault tolerance?  How much availability do we realistically need?  We both mentioned clustering, but neither of us have done clustering or know much about it other than a very surface level understanding.  A quick googling indicated Windows2003 clustering needs/requires 2 "cluster certified" servers and a shared storage device.  Our PowerEdges are most likely cluster certified but we have no shared storage :-(  So after a 3 hour discussion we decided to do some research and see what options are out there.  My gut says we won't be able to afford a high availability solution right now, but it's needed so we should at least get a road map laid out.  Anyone out there have clustering experience?

Daytona 500

I'm not a huge Nascar fan, but I enjoy watching some of the bigger events ... and this year's Daytona 500 did not dissapoint.  The end had some of the most amazing driving I've seen in a while...if only the caution hadn't come out so close to the end.  I felt bad for Tony...poor guy lead almost every single lap then after that last restart he got eaten.  I'm a Gordon fan, well not a "real" fan by Nascar standards, but he's the guy I pull for whenever I watch so I was pleased to see him pull off the win.  Network World had 2 Nascar Technology articles last year ... some really amazing stuff if you hadn't seen it before...

http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2004/082304widernetnascar.html - some kewl snippets:
..."Calculating and displaying real-time information such as speed takes more than a well-aimed radar gun and some quick hands on a keyboard. "It's the most complicated graphic to produce in television," says Bob Hess, track engineer for Sportvision, the Chicago technology company NASCAR contracts with to produce the real-time data and associated graphics for the television broadcasts."
..."Each car is equipped with a GPS receiver embedded in the roof and a Data Acquisition and Positioning System (DAPS) black box mounted near the rear window that collects braking, throttle position and rpm information. Using a 900-MHz transmitter, the DAPS and GPS information is radioed to one of the three or four base stations positioned around the track. ... The telemetry data and GPS data is collected five times per second. To get from the base station to the truck, Sportvision taps into fiber cable connecting the camera positions around the track or a DSL modem connected to Category 3 cabling.

http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2004/082304widernetside.html - some kewl snippets:
..."To ensure [Nextel] service at each race venue, Nextel brings in NasCOW, a tractor-trailer with a retractable antenna that provides the equivalent of six average cell sites."
..."NASCAR is now testing Bluetooth technology that would replace the ¾-inch data cable currently used to connect the driver to the car."
..."Wireless technology is also being investigated for delivering video feeds to the fans sitting in the stands."

It begins

I dabbled with blogging back in '02 ... but saw no real value in it at the time.  Times have changed, tools have made blogging so simple and it's use has skyrocketed.  I've been kicking around the idea of having a church IT focused website since coming to GCC in late '03 as I've found few resources on the internet geared towards church IT ... and so I hope this blog will provide some means toward that end.  How's that for a run-on sentence :-)

In a few weeks I plan to start posting on some best IT practices I've learned over the years.  If you have no IT person at your church or you're the music/youth/IT/?? person...and there are many churches in this boat...I really hope these tips will help you create a solid technology plan.

Lastly, gotta give props to Brian Bailey and his blogs about Typepad ... golly, could blogging BE any easier!?