Jason Powell - Church IT and Other Musings

Church Techies Biggest Loser #7 Signup!

Hard to believe it's been over a year since our last contest.  Regardless, it’s time for installment #7 of our Church Techies Biggest Loser contest!  Here are our guidelines/rules based off our prior BL1 , BL2 , BL3 , BL4, BL5, and BL6 contests.

Would you believe to date participants have lost a combined weight of over 2000 pounds!  Wow!

Eligibility

Any church IT, Web, AV, Tech/Production Arts staff (full, part-time, or volunteer role).  Church ChMS peeps and other Church tech consultants are encouraged to join as well.

Don't fit the above roles, but want to join too? Shoot me an email and we can discuss.

Price is $15 to register ... no refunds … period!

Dates

• Starts Friday Feb 17 ... but you can join ANY TIME after too. Just means you have less time to burn off the flab.
• Ends June 1st (3months and 17 days) just in time to hit the beach ;-)
  
• Winners get a split of the total registration pot less paypal transaction fees (~2.5%) ... breakdown of 75%, 20%, 5% ... if any sponsors/vendors want to kick in prizes too then those well be in the mix to choose from as well.

Weigh Ins

• Weigh ins should occur each Friday at the same time of day. It's OK if you have to weigh in a day or so late due to occasion travel or whatnot.  Just make sure you get your weight recorded each week.  You can only miss a weigh in or 2 before you'll start getting nasty emails from me!
  • Missing 2 weeks in a row IS BAD!! and will most likely get you booted from the contest (no refund). It's not fair to others who are keeping their stats updated, especially once the contest is getting down the wire.
• Participants will record their weekly weight each Friday in our online Google Spreadsheet (you'll get an email after you register).
• Participants may also be required to send a pic of your weight shown on your scales to our private facebook group.
• The same scale must be used for each weigh in.
• The same clothes or lack thereof must be worn at each weigh in.
• Weigh ins will be recorded in whole pounds. If your scale reports partial pounds just drop the fraction...no rounding up or down
• In the final 2 weeks there will be a cap on how much weight you can drop in a given week period ... to keep away from crazy dehydration techniques ;-)

Winning

It's not very fancy, but whoever has the largest weight loss % wins. (max weight - min weight) / max weight

Honor System

The contest assumes that all participants will follow the teachings of the Bible ... you know ... don't lie, don't cheat! If you are dishonest God will deal with you justly.

If you're in ... hit the paypal button to register. OR send a personal paypal transfer (eliminates fees) to gccjason at gmail.  And if you prefer to send $ another way just shoot me an email (gccjason at gmail) and we'll discuss.

Check out the prior Church Techie Biggest Losers: BL1 results and BL2 results and BL3 results and BL4 results and BL5 results

OpenDNS CEO Responds About Free Basic Service Being Axed

This is a continuation from my prior blog post Farewell Free OpenDNS For Businesses (and Churches)

Turns out only SOME businesses/orgs have received the same email we did saying the free OpenDNS Basic service is going away March 15th. Apparently OpenDNS is starting this change with their "top users" and then will roll it out later to everyone else. I find it VERY interesting that GCC is among their "top users" ... I mean our staff is only about 80 full and part-timers.  Wonder what the criteria is to make the top list??

Dean Cooper over on the SpiceWorks community did some digging and here's what he was told:

• Not everyone received notice about the March 15th date. Only the top users of the Basic product.
• This is the beginning of an OpenDNS transition to be a paid only service for business customers. If you did not receive the notice then you can continue to use the Basic product until you do receive notice or they publish it on the website. He would not tell me the timeline for complete transition to being paid only.
• I ask why there is nothing on the website about this and was told that it is because at this time it only effects the top users of the free service and will effect renewals of the Deluxe service plans as they come due this year.
• businesses can continue to use the service for DNS only (no filtering) for free.

Then David Ulevitch, CEO of OpenDNS, commented in thread:

Hey guys -- David from OpenDNS here. We're trying to find the best path forwards that doesn't leave small businesses feeling left out in the cold. We started with our top users as a way of testing the waters with customers who we imagined would be most understanding of the changes, and to gauge the response and feedback.

None of your feedback is wrong, and we care deeply about all the years of support and you've given us. We want to find a way to continue to offer you great security and content filtering services without breaking your bank accounts. Deluxe was EOL'd some time ago, but we have so many existing Deluxe and Basic users who are very large businesses. Our goal is to migrate them to enterprise, and we haven't found the right set of criteria to do that without impacting all of you.

I know it's not your job to negotiate, but I will say that if you are truly a small business, our pricing is much more aggressive than $2,000 per year. That said, I'd love to find a self-serve model for our website that caters to your needs. You're a huge group of customers that I'd love to find a great way to serve. :-)

So, I guess, in short, we're working on it and I'll update when I have more concrete plans of what we want to do.

So there ya have it straight from the CEO.  If you've not gotten an email yet, you will eventually.  You can view the entire forum post here

Farewell Free OpenDNS For Businesses (and Churches)

Well, it's been a good run, but we recently got an email from OpenDNS that they are shutting down their free content filtering solution for businesses. They will still offer a free home solution, but a business (or church) will have to pay starting March 15. Here's a snipet from the email:

...OpenDNS Basic has been redesigned as a product for home use solely, to focus on delivering the best possible experience for individuals and families.  OpenDNS Enterprise, which launched two years ago and now has over 2,500 customers, is our product geared toward professional and commercial use of our Web content filtering and security services.  Though not free like the OpenDNS Basic service you use today, it includes significant additional functionality -- in particular, malware and botnet protection services vetted and chosen by Fortune 100 organizations who rely on OpenDNS Enterprise today.  And don't let the name fool you, while we are proud to have some of the largest companies in the world using OpenDNS, our business offering is competitively priced for businesses of all sizes.

If you choose not to migrate, you will continue to receive the same, best-in-class recursive DNS services for free without any usage limits, however all filtering functionality will be disabled on March 15th...

Here's the full announcement

WE started using OpenDNS at GCC on 7/30/08. Prior to that we were using the content filters on our Sonicwall firewall, but we had enough problems with it we went searching for a better solution … and thus started testing OpenDNS.

So I contacted OpenDNS to see if they offered a non-profit discount and to get pricing. Pricing is based on number of users you support … which is confusing if you're a church. If we include weekend attendees that's over 5000 people while our staff is about 80 full and part-timers. The quote I got back for 100 users was $2000 - $500 (non-profit discount) = $1500. While that's a descent discount, it's still way to much for my budget when our Sonicwall firewalls already have content filter licensing. We just haven't used the Sonicwall filters in forever! I'm told by other IT peers that the Sonicwall filters are far better than in years past … guess we'll soon find out ourselves :-)

I'm still a big fan of the free OpenDNS Family Shield solution for homes. Quick, easy, free and works very well.

[edit 2/8/12 12:58pm] After telling our OpenDNS rep we'll pass, he says he can get us down to $1000/yr.  Also had another church IT peer suggest we check out the free DynDNS filtering solution that sounds VERY similar to what OpenDNS has done for us. 

[edit 2/9/12] More info about the coming change in this forum

GCC's Servers & Storage have a new offsite home! Part 2

(Psst, hey you. You may want to go read Part 1 first)

After months and months of planning and prep work GCC's main IT production gear moved offsite to a real datacenter just a few weeks ago on Sunday Jan 22nd! w00t! We've always wished we could have our gear in sweet colocation (colo) space, but I never would have guessed we'd be there in early 2012 or even 2020 due to costs. How this came to be is a fun story, but it's not short … so that will be another blog post or 2 down the road :-)

Until then, here's a few details and pictures. Oh and monster props to Justin who did all the heavy lifting to plan, prep and execute the myriad of complexities of this move as there were a number of huge network changes and upgrades that proceeded the actual move. Thanks also to IT volunteers Ed Buford, Tom Templin, and Aaron Nush for their help Sunday to relocate the gear. Additional thanks to Ed Buford and Pinnacle for Exchange changes the week prior to the move to minimize email downtown.

Where is the gear now?
We're part of a non-profit co-op sharing a micro suite at Global Access Point (GAP) in downtown South Bend, IN. We share a 42U rack with our long time friend Josh from Center For Hospice Care for the price of … FREE! We're currently fully utilizing 20U of space (see below) and Josh says we can have a few of his U's if needed … right Josh? ;-)
The going rate for space at GAP is $50-70/U/month so we're getting $1000-$1400/mo of space at no cost. Booyah!

We have dedicated redundant 20A power feeds into our PDU in the rack so if one 20A feed goes down the other takes over without a power drop. The power feeds are also on UPS and generator backups … it's sweet to no longer worry when thunderstorms roll into the area wondering if power will go out at GCC. The downside? It's a salty $350/mo for said power. Wonder if any of the top dogs at GAP go to GCC? Would love to find a way to lower that cost.

How does the data get between GCC and the colo?
This is part of the long story mentioned above, but we have a sweet Metronet dark fiber link between GCC and our router at the colo at whatever speed we can light it. For now we're lighting it a 1Gig since 10Gig lasers aren't cheap. We'll monitor the link for a while to see how congested it gets. We're using Cogent as our ISP as they have a presence at GAP and were priced very well. We pay for 100Mbps up/down burstable to 400Mbps, but we've seen it hit as high as 500Mbps! The kicker? The cost is LESS than what we were paying for our ATT fiber at 10Mbps! Booyah! What's fun is when staff publicly cheer about how fast our internet speeds are like this tweet from Dustin :-)
Honestly, it's a bit strange to think about all our gear being downtown and accessed over a small optical fiber pair the size of a human hair. According to the Metronet folks, our optical path to the colo is 11.4 miles while the driving distance is only 7 miles. So, while it takes 20mins to get to the colo by car, it's a mere 90 microseconds for data traveling down the fiber :-)

And yes, we do have a cheap comcast business connection into GCC as our backup ISP. Should the fiber go down for some reason we can reroute most things over the comcast connection and limp along.

Guess I'll need a part 3 to go over a few more details like what gear is still at GCC, but until then here are some pics from the move.

Tom, Justin, Ed, Aaron ripping gear from the rack

Loading gear into cars. Thankfully the weather wasn't too bad considering the time of year.
All our junk in the Suite hallway. Tom is looking into our micro-suite. Yes, we brought a table and 2 chairs along with the gear since there's no place to sit or sit stuff :)
Justin and Ed hoist one of our Dell R710 ESXi hosts onto it's rails

Justin and Ed starting to wire up gear at the rear of the rack

Tom is working on the rails for our 2nd and oldest PS100E EqualLogic array

Tom and Ed working(?) at the rear of the rack. Yes, it's a bit cramped back there.

Front view of the rack with all gear in place. It's a bummer that the top R510 bezel is black and thus doesn't match the R710's and EqualLogic PS6000E :-(
Oh, we also need to take out the sliding shelf above the KVM at some point.

Rear rack view. Cables mainly nice and tidy and correctly color coded based on function. Also note our rear door can actually close unlike our neighbors. Maybe they'll be inspired to clean up their cabling after seeing ours? #doubtful

If you have question about any of this leave a comment and I'll try to address with a comment or include in the part 3 post.

Google Apps For Nonprofits AGAIN Open to Churches/Ministries

As many of you probably know, in March 2011, Google decided to no longer allow Churches/Ministry/Places of Worship access into their FREE Google For Nonprofits program (see article in Christianity Today). The result was churches/ministries would be required to pay $60/yr per user just like any other business. Yes, a number of Churches applying to the program were NOT happy and the fear was that churches already accepted and using Google For Nonprofits could be dropped from the free program without warning. Google never did give a reason why they decided to exclude Churches from the free program. Obviously, they can do whatever they want and given their history of not recognizing Christian holidays like Easter and Christmas this seemed like yet another jab at Christianity. So whatev's…

Then last week my buddy Derek Berg posted on twitter and his blog that he received an email from Google stating they were again changing their stance. He's the short and sweet "borrowed" from his blog:

"Organizations under the following categories may now be eligible for the Google for Nonprofits Program:

• Places or institutions of worship
• Programs requiring membership and/or providing benefit solely to members
• Websites with a primary focus on selling goods, products or services
• Car, boat, and real estate donation websites
• Consumer credit counseling

I went and checked Google's eligibility requirements and indeed it no longer excludes nor even mentions places or institutions of worship. They do have an FAQ that mentions a recent change in the eligibility guidelines, but doesn't list the changes. Link to the changes made

So, if you've been previously denied access to the Google For Nonprofits program because you're a church or ministry … go apply again :-)

And in case anyone is wondering … at GCC we have both Microsoft Exchange2010 and Google Apps, but have done very little with GApps thus far.

[edit 2/9/12] A Church IT peer just tweeted that their church has just been approved under the new eligibility change

[edit 2/20/12] Found a link where Google lists the eligibility changes https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/googlefornonprofits-discuss/8Gz64ixASWc

Registration Open for 2012 National Church IT Roundtable!

It's finally time to open registration for the 2012 National Church IT Roundtable April 18-20 in Dallas, TX! w00t w00t and a yeeeehawwww (Texas style)!

I'm soooooo pumped about this event … I can hardly stand it! This year we've added an optional 3rd day of training opportunities and other activities that we feel most won't want to miss. AND … get this, the 3rd day is no extra charge! All 3 days for only $75…thanks to our awesome sponsors/partners!

How about some tasty VMware and Network infrastructure design and best practices? Or Exchange2010 setup/migration/tuning? Or VoIP and Unified Communications? That's just a tease of what we're working on :-)

ALSO new this year, we're making a focused effort to involve Church Web/ChMS developers! In the past our events have focused more on the Network Admin/Help Desk side of IT … now we want our web/dev peeps to benefit from an event like this as much as we do. They'll have their own breakout sessions to geek out about code, APIs, ChMS integrations, tools and best practices as it pertains to their job roles. These breakouts will be lead by web/dev heads David Drinnon (Second Baptist Houston) and Chris Kehayias (Calvary Chapel Melbourne). So go now and invite your web/dev peeps on staff (assuming that's not your role too) to join you this spring.

SERIOUSLY - this is THE MUST ATTEND EVENT of 2012 for all church IT staff and volunteers! If you can only afford one event this year - this is THE ONE! I've been to every National CITRT event since 2006, helps that I started the 1st one heehee, and each year I continue to be amazed at how God uses this event to bring church IT folks together to sharpen one another and push the Kingdom forward. I guarantee if you come your brain will be filled to max capacity, you'll be throughly encouraged, and your spirit will be lifted towards almighty God. Tell me what other IT conference does all that! They don't :-)

Last year we had over 180 in attendance, this year we expect to surpass that easily! Training slots on Wednesday will be limited so register early! AND don't forget to spread the word. Reach out to churches near you and invite them too … oh, and don't forget your web/dev peeps as well!

Get details and register at http://churchITnetwork.com/spring2012/

GCC's Servers & Storage have a new offsite home! Part 1

This is part 1 of a multi-part series of blog posts about the COLO move we made last Sunday. Part 1 is just the all staff email I sent to our staff about the change. Normally my all staff emails are pretty brief and to the point, but I decided to be more verbose about this change since it was so monumental. Parts 2 and beyond will have more juicy details and specifics about the project. Happy reading!

---------------------------------------------

Beloved staff friends,
Just a heads up that tomorrow/Sunday afternoon we're making one of THE largest IT transitions in GCC's history … and hopefully you'll hardly notice it at all :-) What cha doin'? Well, we're moving the bulk of all our servers and storage gear to a state of the art Data Center/Colocation Center (aka the COLO) at Union Station in downtown South Bend! (yes, across the street from The Cove)
Uh, dude? Wha??? It's a long story that started last Spring and has some fun God stories :-) The short of it is we now have space in … get this … the same facility that houses the Notre Dame Supercomputer Cluster, some of the Amazon.com servers, and many other large companies local and US. We also have a dark fiber connection from Union Station to GCC (think of it as a really flippin' long network cable) which will make accessing GCC servers no different really than if they're housed at GCC. Cool eh? You've actually already been using the dark fiber and some of our gear already at the COLO. Our uber fast internet connection originates at Union Station and our email server was moved over there last Weds night. Booyah!
Why do this? We don't really have the type of space we'd like at GCC to house our critical gear. From security access, to backup power needs, to AC, to fire suppression (sprinklers and servers don't mix), etc. Union Station gives us all that and more … and we got a killer deal on it. Basically, we'll sleep better at night when storms roll through and tornado warnings go off knowing our gear and YOUR DATA is in a secure hardened building with lots of redundancies.
So after months of planning, late night work at GCC and Union Station (aka the COLO) we're finally ready to move most of our gear…and yes we are excited!!!
What stays at GCC? A few things will stay at GCC like the bookstore/café server, print server, and filezilla (aka the media drive). These, along with internet access, will remain available while we're moving stuff downtown.
So after the last expo is over (1pm-ish) we'll start powering down all the servers that are moving. You still get email access during this time.We then CAREFULLY unrack, box and load the gear for drive over to Union Station. Installing the gear at the COLO will be the longest part as we have to cable things compactly and neatly due to space constraints. During this time we'll have to drop email access periodically.Then we'll power things back up and start testing systems. Begin the office pool now on what time we actually leave the COLO and head home :-)
We'll be live streaming much of the activity (because we're geeky that way) here: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/jpowellcam

Follow @gcctechops on twitter with notifications turned ON if you want up to date info on when we're making changes, stuff that's broken, and when it's fixed :-) DON'T USE TWITTER? No problem! You can get TXT notifications without using twitter:

Just text FOLLOW GCCTECHOPS to 40404

If you have any questions about this don't hesitate to contact me directly. And we'd certainly covet your prayers tomorrow. We've tried to plan this process well and not disrupt activities Sunday afternoon, but there are so many complex moving pieces and we all know technology can be finicky at times.

Thanks,

Jason … No, COLO does NOT mean Colorado! … Powell

Help Desk Stats For 2011 Part 1

I enjoy stats. So when each year ends it's fun to see how our help desk stats have changed vs the prior year. Did we have more or less support requests? What were the variables driving the overall activity each month and the entire year? Were any IT initiatives or improvements reflected in the stats?

All things considered equal, we're hoping to see fewer overall requests each year. If that's the case, one could assume that our systems and equipment are performing well and thus staff are busy getting ministry done instead of needing IT support. However, things are often changing from year to year so it's important to factor in all variables. Opening a new multisite campus, replacing a phone system, upgrading everyone to a new version of X software - all these types of changes usually bring an uptick in support requests.

So how did we make out in 2011? Although I was VERY pleased to see that our overall requests were down from last year, I wasn't very surprised. Why? Our team, which includes several awesome volunteers, has labored hard over the past years to build a very solid IT foundation. And when you build a very solid foundation it will be reflected in things like server/service uptime and accessibility. Last year was an extremely quiet year from a "problem" standpoint … servers and their services did their thing and plugged along without intervention. This was a huge blessing since 2011 was the busiest year we've seen in a long time for other reasons. 2011 was our first year going from a 3 man IT team down to 2. Add to that several LARGE projects like: planning for building expansion that broke ground late 2011, planning to open a new pre-school in 2012, moving our multisite location to a permanent location with staff offices, relocating our main fiber connection into the building, started transition to predominately Mac platform for end users, and prepping to move the bulk of our production IT gear to a new datacenter downtown. There's prob other stuff, but those were some of the big one's that came to mind. So 2011 was crazy busy, but not from helpdesk requests thankfully! If we'd had stuff breaking left and right on top of all the big projects … well, I'm not sure the outcome ;-)

Stay tuned for part 2 where I'll go over more thoughts on our help desk stats and the tools we've used over the years.

Other 'help desk' posts you might like: http://jpowell.blogs.com/.services/blog/6a00d8345325d569e200d8345325d769e2/search?filter.q=help+desk

My 2012 One Blog Post A Week Goal

Well hello there blog! Long time no see.

After severe neglect over the past 2 years, I've decided (after much building guilt and prompting from friends/peers) to revive you again from the ashes of despair. My goal is simple: One blog post for you each week.

I've even asked a few select friends to keep me accountable to you this year :-)

So stay tuned my friend! I look forward to getting to know you again!!!

REGISTRATION OPEN for our Fall 2011 Regional Roundtables

REGISTRATION OPEN for our Fall 2011 Regional Roundtables:  
Below are the sites confirmed with possibly 1 more still TBA.  You'll not want to miss this opportunity of learning from your fellow Church IT peers!
Cost is $35.  Go to http://citrt.org for registration and more details.  Registration closes Oct 15 so signup ASAP.

Austin, Texas - Hill Country Bible Church - October 25th
Albuquerque, NM - Calvary Chapel Albuquerque - October 26th
Ft Lauderdale, FL - Calvary Chapel Ft. Lauderdale - October 26th
Indianapolis, IN - Northview Church - October 20th
Minneapolis, MN - Bethlehem Baptist - October 28th
McLean, VA - McLean Bible Church - October 24th
Nashville, TN - Brentwood Baptist - October 20th
Riverside, CA - Harvest - October 26th
Rockford, IL - Heartland Community Church - October 25th
St. Louis, MO - The Crossing - October 25th
Savannah, GA - Savannah Christian Church - October 25th

I'll be at the IL location ... looking forward to seeing and learning from my Church IT peers. Geeks for Jesus!!!