Jason Powell - Church IT and Other Musings

Church IT Roundtable @ GCC Confirmed for Sept 26th

I got confirmation today that we're a GO for holding our 2nd Church IT Roundtable at GCC Sept 26th as part of our 2007 Innovate Conference.  I'm so pumped to get the opportunity to do this again!  It's been a hoot to watch what the roundtable has become since last September.  Geeks for Jesus!

Once again, this is not intended in any way, shape, or form to detract from the "official" 2007 Fall Church IT Roundtable that Clif and company are hosting Oct 3-4 in Kansas City ... in fact, I'm still planning to attend that one myself.

Consider this as just another opportunity for church IT folks to get together for a day of networking, learning, and discussion ... especially if you can't make Clif's event or have staff already planning to attend our Innovate conference.  Registration for the Roundtable will be limited so leave a comment here if you'd like to be notified once registration opens.

I'll make a nice plug for our Innovate Conference here too.  It's going to be incredible this year ... Guy Kawasaki among other kewlness.  There's even a rumor I might get to do an IT Best Practices Breakout Session during one of the main days.  Here's some more deets...

   

Innovate '07 - Sept 27/28

This is NOT YOUR ORDINARY church leadership gathering. It’s Innovate '07, hosted by Granger Community Church. It’s where you’ll learn to relate. Adapt. Change. And yeah, innovate.

The compelling teaching, music and drama you’ll experience at Innovate? That’s our version. Yours will be different. AND IT SHOULD BE.

With inspiring stories and surprising strategies for daring to be different, Innovate '07 will fuel your creativity. So you can make a permanent – and powerful – impact on your church, your community and the world.

With Mark Beeson and the Granger team you’ll network with the best of the best, and hear from great leaders and compelling speakers – including Guy Kawasaki, former Apple guru turned author, entrepreneur, evangelist, investment banker and venture capitalist.

Granger is located just 90 miles east of Chicago. Registration begins at 7:45 a.m. The sessions will run from 8:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m.

Register by August 27, 2007 to receive the Early Bird rate of $219 per person. Group Rates for 2-5 people are $199 and for 6 or more $179. After August 27, 2007 add $20 to the price of each registration.

Other workshops happening Sept 26th you should take note of and tell a friend ...

Purpose Driven Church Basic

Student Ministry 101

Web

MinistryCOM ... who's going? Possible IT Roundtable options?

First - Earlybird registration for MinistryCOM is almost over ... so I'm wondering what other IT folks are going this year?  I'm close to saying yes, if I know others of you are there I'm in :-)

Secondly - If there are several of us IT folks at this thing, why don't we pull off some sort of IT Roundtable before/during/afterwards?  My guess is that there are a number of folks who are Web/IT/Comm that will be at MinistryCom ... let's figure out how to capitalize on that. 

Anyone interested in somehow piggybacking an IT Roundtable on MinistryCOM?

Anyone in the Franklin, TN area that might be able to host an IT gathering in the Sept 12-15 range?

New Ozzy Album?!

I was a bit surprised to see a new release from Ozzy in my Yahoo Music Jukebox player this morning.  New Ozzy?  The dude can barely speak a single coherent sentence whenever I see him on TV the past years ... and he's still singing?

Yup, and surprisingly his voice is clear and strong.

The album is called Black Rain ... and I just had to go take listen.  I've never been a huge Ozzy fan, but man can Zakk Wylde play some tasty licks ... and yes, I have a select very few Ozzy songs in my music library for the crunchy guitar riffs.

The first 2-3 songs are a nice guitar feast with Ozzy's typical "singing" ... some sweet-o guitar solos from Zakk.  Once you've listened to the first 2 songs you've heard the rest of the album IMHO.

The beauty of Yahoo Music is that I can listen to this new Ozzy to satisfy my curiosity ... then never listen to it again ... all for the same $5/mo ;-)

500 Bonus Points for the person who can guess my favorite heavy metal group back in the mid-late 80's ... ONE GUESS ALLOWED PER DAY PER USER to make it fair.

Here's a fun link to the styles that were hip back in the 80's ... too funny!  What was your favorite 80's look?

... long live ripped up acid washed jeans (pegged of course), mullets and high top sneakers! :-)

Now, Discover Your Strengths

Our entire team ... Communications, Web, IT ... is going through Marcus Buckingham's 'Now, Discover Your Strengths' book.  We've only gone through the first 4 chapters, but it's already been pretty eye opening.  Last week each of us took the online Strengths Finder assessment which is designed to measure your talents/potential strengths across 34 categories and report your top 5.

Now before I reveal what it said about me, here's something I've found interesting.  Before this, I've never taken a single personality or similar assessment.  How can that be!?  You'd think being a Physics/Education major I would have encountered something in my education classes ... nada.  How did I get into and through grad school, again with a Physics/Education bent, without ever doing the Meyers Briggs??  Oh well.

So what did the assessment reveal about me?  Well, much of it pegs me.  My wife read the results and said, "yup, that sounds like you."  One of my talents was kinda surprising, and one talent I thought for sure I'd have didn't show in the top 5 ... hmmm.

So for what it's worth, here's the brief version of my top 5 raw talents in order from strongest ...

Learner - People strong in the Learner theme have a great desire to learn and want to continuously improve. In particular, the process of learning, rather than the outcome, excites them.  This is certainly me, but I'm surprised it's at the top.

Deliberative - People strong in the Deliberative theme are best described by the serious care they take in making decisions or choices. They anticipate the obstacles.  Oh man, this is sooo me!  This drives certain people, like my wife, totally bonkers at times :-)

Analytical - People strong in the Analytical theme search for reasons and causes. They have the ability to think about all the factors that might affect a situation.  Hmm, no surprise here.  I would have thought this would have been higher though.

Achiever - People strong in the Achiever theme have a great deal of stamina and work hard. They take great satisfaction from being busy and productive.  Totally me again.

Context - People strong in the Context theme enjoy thinking about the past. They understand the present by researching its history.  This is the puzzler of the five.  If you read the full blown description of context it does fit me to a certain point ... perhaps more than I yet realize so I'm not writing it off as incorrect.  It's certainly sparked my curiosity.

Now, after looking at all 34 possible talent areas I'm VERY surprised that this one didn't make my list:
Strategic - People strong in the Strategic theme create alternative ways to proceed. Faced with any given scenario, they can quickly spot the relevant patterns and issues.  Come on!  How did this not make my top 5?!  I enjoy strategic stuff and have been told I'm pretty good at it.  I'll have to assume this is number 6 on my list ... though it will bug me not knowing.  Perhaps I'll find a way to take the test again someday and vindicate my strategic talents :-)

I really think having this info is going to be a big plus for our team ... but I'll save that for a later post.  Next objectives/chapters are about taking these talents and cultivating them into strength areas ... should be interesting.

Prayer Request

My mother-in-law, Virginia Yates, could really use your prayers.  She was submitted into the ICU at DeKalb Memorial in Auburn, IN early this morning due to chest pains and difficulty breathing.  So far we’re being told it’s congestive heart failure and fluid in her lungs.

We would appreciate your prayers.

Thanks,

Jason, Kim and family

UPDATE 5/25/07 10:30pm:  Docs say she had a heart attack last night and the breathing difficulty is from large fluid buildup in her lungs.  She's still in the ICU, but they are optimistic that she'll be able to come home in a few days pending more testing and continued improvement.

UPDATE 5/27/07 10:50pm:  She's still in the ICU, but docs say she might be able to come home Tues/Weds following more tests and continued improvement.  Thanks everyone for praying.

Get Your New Dell ... At Wal-Mart?

As seen on BetaNews

Dell has entered into an agreement with Wal-Mart that will put its desktops in 3,400 of the chain's stores beginning June 10, retailing for under $700.

Rest of the story

Church IT Podcast Episode 8 Post Show Notes

Well, better late than never ... here's a short recap from the recent episode #8 Church IT Podcast.

We had 16 folks on the conference call, 12 via chat window only, and 10 live audio stream only listeners.  Can you believe that to date, the 8 podcasts have seen a total of 965 downloads!  Sweet!  Keep spreading the word ... Geeks for Jesus!!

COOL TOOLS mentioned
Mozy.com and MozyPro.com for online backups
SpinVox.com - voicemail to text!
PDAnet - use your mobile phone as a broadband modem
ebuford.com - Jason Lee said Ed was his hero this week
adobe media encoder - creates real time flash stream
Red5 open source flash streaming server

Local and Fall Kansas City Roundtable Updates

Some GREAT discussion on "how do you measure IT health"?  What metrics are you capturing to show your boss the "state of IT" at your church?  How can you go about trying to prove you need additional IT staffing?

Once the recording was stopped, a number of us chatted for another 1.5 hours!  I'd encourage everyone to set aside 2 hours for the podcast.  The first 1hr 15mins-ish for the recorded stuff and the rest for the post show phone chat.  It's kinda funny that once the record button is off the discussion becomes a bit more "lively" as people seem to feel more free to talk :-)

Again, we're doing this interactive podcast every 1st and 3rd Thursday at 2pm Eastern (-4GMT) over on talkshoe.com

The main topic for the next podcast (June 7th) will be on volunteers and Church IT.  Come listen to and share your experiences both good and bad about working with volunteers in IT.

OpenCola ... I'd like to teach the world to sing ...

Here ya go ... OpenCola, an open source cola recipe!

I have no idea why I'm bloggin' about this other than it made me laugh :-)

Hmm, is there anything the internet doesn't contain?

[insert large group of people singing] "I'd like to teach the world to sing, in perfect harmony .... [fade singing]

MozyPro ... support and a call from a VP

I mentioned in my last MozyPro post that for some reason I couldn't get MozyPro to correctly run a SQL backup.  So rather than calling tech support I decided to just shoot an email to support with a link to my blog post ... thus they could see screen shots and whatnot.

Within 6 minutes I had an email reply back from Bryan asking to send me the log file.  About 10mins after I sent the log file Bryan said it looked like there wasn't enough disk space for Mozy to encode the files.  Sure enough, the C drive on our SQL box had about 1.5GB free space and this particular SQL database was 2.3GB ... doh!  By default MozyPro uses the C:\windows\temp directory for all it's file mojo ... not enough room and it won't run completely.  Makes perfect sense.

Bryan also sent directions (see below) on how to change the default directory ... which after following made the SQL backup work like a champ.  Kudos for rapid tech support!

That same day I also got a call from the VP of Product Development at Berkeley Data Systems ... the makers of Mozy/MozyPro.  Vance wanted to hear my experience, both good and bad, and seemed genuinely interested in my feedback.  He was catching a plane at the time so we had to cut the conversation off before we had a chance to fully dialog ... another chat is being planned.

While I feel they have a sweet solution for a sweet price, 2 major areas I feel they need to address are:

• Some mechanism to get your data to their data center BEFORE sync'ing.  At $.45/GB I'd be game to backup 500GB or so to them ... but that would take forever just to get the initial upload done.  Other online backup solutions will send you drives to populate and return, I strongly urge Berkeley to do likewise.  Shoot, just send me cheap-o USB Lacie drives or similar.  The Mozy client could encrypt and dump to the USB drive instead of uploading over the internet.  Then I can just send them the drive(s) back ... the data is encrypted so even if the drives get stolen during shipping I'm not going to sweat it that much.  A tech could contact me once they have the data ready for online sync and now I'm just sending block changes to their servers which shouldn't be that large of a data set per day (excluding large A/V files).  There should also be a way to get the data shipped back to me should disaster occur.  Should the church be wiped out, I can't wait weeks for our data to download.
• The MozyPro app must load faster.  When you open the app to do anything, you must wait for it to populate the backup sets you've flagged for backup.  For what I can tell, this means that the app must crawl the entire drive(s) looking for the files with the appropriate extensions.  On our 400GB file server this can take up to 5 minutes or more.  When you want to make a single quick configuration change, or say check the history log, this wait period just doesn't make me happy.  Perhaps make the app only do new backup set refreshes if you hit a refresh button or something ... don't make it scan drives during app startup ... please!

Address those 2 issues and they've got a killer solution for the price.  Granted, I've only been testing MozyPro for a week now and thus may uncover other issues with more testing.  For instance, I've not tested a single restore yet mainly 'cause I'm waiting for everything to get uploaded first.

Like most folks, I fully agree that online backups will not replace your D2D and tape backups ... upload speed is just not fast enough.  However, as a low cost supplement to your backup strategy, online backups have certainly gotten my attention and curiosity.  And I should also mention that our IT buddy Dean over at ACS is still pursuing online storage solutions in addition to their LiveStor product ... so something sweet may become of that as well.  Stay tuned ...

How to change the default temp directory for MozyPro:

1. Make sure you're running Mozy 1.8.2.3 or later.  (You can the latest version at http://mozy.com/downloads/mozysetup.exe)

2. Create a new folder for Mozy to build its files in. Most people use something like D:\mozytemp\
3. Open your registry editor by click the Start menu, then Run, and typing 'regedit'. Click OK.

4. Open HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Mozy\options

5. Right click the right pane and click New > String Value 6. Change the new value's name to 'tempdir'

7. Right click the value and select Edit.

8. Change the value to the name of the folder you created. (If you created D:\mozytemp\, make the value 'D:\mozytemp\')
9. Save the changes and close the registry editor.

10. Open a command prompt (click the Start menu, then Run, and type 'cmd'. Click OK.)
11. Type "net stop mozybackup" and hit Enter
12. Type "net start mozybackup" and hit Enter.

NOTE:  steps 11/12 didn't work for me so I just went into Admin Tools>services and restarted the mozy service.

MozyPro ... 5 days later

Continuing my online backup testing ... 5 days later and 20.2GB uploaded to MozyPro servers ... for an average of 4.04GB/day.

A smarter dude would have ran the MozyPro client on a different box rather than running it directly on our main fileserver which also hosts 4 or so VM's.  That certainly could have an impact on why I'm not seeing more of our uplink being utilized ;-)

I've also started testing SQL backups with MozyPro ... sadly it's not working for some reason.  The log files show that the app is encoding the database file, but the upload never starts.

Perhaps it's time to give tech support a ring and see how that goes.

I finally made a new blog category for backups so all these backup posts are nestled all together ... hmm, it's not often I use the word nestled.

The testing continues...

UPDATE:  I shot an email to MozyPro support about the SQL issue ... they responded back within 6 minutes and I've now sent them the log files for further investigation.  Gotta love prompt support :-)

UPDATE2: About 10mins later I got an email back with some steps to try ... and waalaa ... SQL backups are now crankin'.