Fun Giving Gifts

I had one of those moments last week where got to enjoy the fact that it is really alot more fun to give than receive…

A couple weeks ago I saw woot.com was selling the remote micro helicopters. Since I hadn’t yet bought christmas gifts for my staff I couldn’t pass the opourtunity to buy them… not to mention the cool factor of the gift was clearly increased by purchasing it from Woot.com.

I have not recently anticipated a box arriving as much as this one.  I had heard of the joy woot’s $5 shipping brought but I had not yet experinced it.  The hardest part… I couldn’t share the Woot.com joy with my coworkers or it would ruin the suprise.

Well long story short, I gave the remote control helicopters to Jim and Jeremie and they were a hit.  And yes you’ll notice in the photo, I couldn’t pass up giving one of these awesome gifts to myself…  So it is great to give and recieve i suppose…

So now if you come by Northwoods you might find the Activity center graced with the buzz of micro helicoper blades spinning the next time the IT staff is needing to let off some steam.

Merry Christmas Blog Readers… While I didn’t purchase a micro helicopter for each of you this season, I hope you too experince the true Gift of Christ this Christmas.

GPS for Jesus?

I have heard of Lojack for your car, motorcycle, your tractor trailer and your laptop but now they are putting GPS on Jesus.  The baby Jesus in a nativity in Bal Harbour, Florida has been stolen enough times that he was bolted down… and still stolen… so now they are adding GPS to Jesus, Mary and Joseph.

Change to your backup strategy?

How would your backup strategy change if you could burn a DVD that held 1TB, or even just 500GB at the cost of $30 per disk?

 Israel-based Mempile Inc. is set to demonstrate burning the 500GB DVD at CES International 2008.  Their market is currently aimed at backups but the entertainment industry says that this is just the next step towards a better HD recording system.  But for now…. could you imagine 250,000 high-resolution photos or MP3s, or about 40 HD movies or 115 DVD movies on the same DVD?

F5 is ‘out’?

Our quest for Link Aggrigation and Load Balancing continues and I ‘think’ we have removed one horse from the race.

F5 is a great product don’t get me wrong, they appear to have a great product line but they don’t appear to specialize in this space.  Our Reasons for taking them out of the running:
-While their linkcontroller would work, it also appears to be another solution repackaged to ‘fit’ in this niche.  They also wanted to tell us we needed a lot more stuff than we do.. i.e site caching, high amounts of compression, etc.  While these features are great we decided we don’t need them in this box.
-The other concern, it only has 4 ports.  All the competition has at lest 8 ports on their devices and would seem to grow and expand with us more.
- Lastly the price.  Their bids are $4k-$5K more than any other vendor in this space.  While their product might be worth the price, its out of our price range.

So who is still in the running?  The two front runners are Warp by FatPipe, Inc. and LinkProof50 by Radware.  Where do we stand with those two?  Radware has a little lead, we like their interface and the granularity they provide in the load-balancing.  The demo-to-buy units from FatPipe and Radware are in the works and on their way.

There are some dark horses entering the race… Larry our hardware specialist from Dell has recommended we look at products from Barracuda, Juniper and Citrix… we’ll see what they recommend.

FREE SharePoint Training Registration Closing Soon

Registration will close on December 21st for the SharePoint Training.  We must close the registration so we can finalize the numbers for the courseware Mindsharp is providing for each of the attendees.

If you haven’t registered yet, and you are planning to attend, WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?  If you are wavering as to are you going to attend why not, ITS FREE!

For Church Employees/Volunteer “Staff” Register Here

For Consultants and Vendors Serving the Church market Register Here

The Move is on…

A few days ago our call to arms was similar to that of Paul Revere … “The Data Racks are Comming, The Data Racks are Comming!”  Our new Data Racks had finally arrived we quickly unpacked them to install in the new DataCenter.

Today,Day 3 of the telephone system relocation and has come to an end.  Or Technicans Darren and John from CTS have gone home for the day and plan to return for day 4 tomorrow.   Note: This was suppose to be a 2 day project.

The first stages of relocating to our DataCenter is moving the telephone system from its old location to the new telecom rack in the DataCenter.  The old phone location was not cooled nor did it have power from the generator… not to mention the “cleaned up wiring” was a disaster.  I have been told what we pulled out today was the improved ‘mess’ from the intial install.

We have pulled the rats nest out out and are now rewiring the phone system on two new trunk lines (one 100 and one 200 pair trunks).

For more exciting DataCenter news, visit www.jkilgore.net

F5, FatPipe or Radware

Our continuing increase in online media, hosted services and a general need for speed has lead us to a quest for more bandwidth.  The acquiring of more bandwidth we are learning is the easy and less costly part of the venture.  The most expensive part of our quest is turning  out to be the hardware to combine multiple connections to deliver said bandwidth to our network.

We have contracted with AT&T to replace our A5T1 and with Insight (soon to be Comcast) to provide two 15mbx1.5mb cable modem connections.  We are ditching A5 for several reasons: 1 the price, they are charging double for the same service as AT&T and they won’t even try to match the price 2. Their support is plain awful; while the connectivity has been good, any time we call them its awful.  One example: during an outage we needed some information about our IP addresses and router.  I had previously given every possible contact info about me.  I verified that info and yet they still insisted on returning my call 90 minutes later… Since then we have been on a quest to change vendors.

So since the closest available fiber is over 2 miles away, we have landed with the 3 link solution.  We are currently evaluating 3 products. Link Controller by F5, FatPip’s 30Mb WARPand Radware’s Link Proof.

Have you ever used any of these products?  If you have and would like to chat with us email me or post your thoughts in the comments…

More to come… Online Demos: 2 down 1 to go.  So far each company is willing to give us a 30 day trial too….

Don’t forget to keep your templates

Well we had another great experince with VMware technical support.  Our $500 24/7 support for VMWare Server has paid off one more time. 

Because of our recent SAN crash we had to rebuild many of our virtual servers, one of those was our second Domain Controller.  I powered this ‘empty virtual server’ off earlier this week so I could make sure that I had completely removed all referances to its predicesor from the metadata in AD.  So we walked thru the microsoft KB article ‘How to remove data in Active Directory after an unsuccessful domain contorller demotion’ (Granted it was unsuccessful because the server didnt’ exist anymore not because DCPromo didn’t work).

So after AD is cleaned up I waited 24 hrs for AD to replicate and produce a days worth of clean event logs and all was well… until i tried to boot the virtual DC.  VMware returned a message that the server was not in inventory.  Not in invetory I could see the name displayed right there in the inventory list.  I quickly checked and the server’s VMDK and other files were all in the correct location… so i called VMware Support.

After the normal “I normally support ESX not Server, let me try to help” routine we are accustom to the tech remotely connected and remove the server from the host registration.  He then said build a new server and copy the hard drive into that directory… Better yet he said I could take the template we have and just copy that config over.

So I saved the harddrive file and put it with the template config and booted up the machine… And we are back in business.

100% success with VMware Support.

Congrats Crater Buddies!

Congrats to my Buddy Lukie the Salukie, ESQ and Little Buddy Laura on the birth of their daughter.

Adelyn Joy Crater was born Tuesday 12/11 at 6:23 PM  weighing 7.5 Oz. and 21.5 inches long.    

Progress… Finally

Jeremie has blogged about why we are moving to our new DataCenter so i’ll show you some photos of the progress.  The fire suppresion system was installed last week.