Warm Fuzzies…being appreciated

It can’t go over looked how nice it makes you feel when you are appreciated!  The ‘Staff Christmas Party’ this year was another really fun event.  We started the day with a breakfast at the church where our leadership team gave each staff member an really cool jacket with our new northwoods logo on it…then 45 of our staff piled into a charter bus to head to the ‘windy city’.

Our 3 hour bus ride included the entertainment of Yankee Trader Gift Exchange.. this is always an EVENT at the staff Christmas party, but this year was different.  We didn’t give $10 gifts but rather gave our $10 bucks to a local charity and had to MAKE our gifts.  Jeremie Kilgore and I started to create our strategy early on as to how we would play the ‘game’.  We identified the ‘high value’ gifts within the first 10 rounds.  The ‘Black and white matted photo’, the 2 gift cards, and the book ends in the shape of crosses made from a melted down car chassis….  Our strategy paid off.. we both were ‘in play for 20+ of the 43 rounds… not bad for pulling an early number.  Well I ended up with about 4 lbs of awesome fudge.  I gave a home made Yule Log  and Jeremie gave a Snow Globe… well its nice especially since he made the thing… It was really cool… maybe he’ll post a photo on his site soon (HINT HINT JK).

Our day entailed an awesome lunch, a trip to the apple store to stump the genius, a trip to the audiologist for our music guys to get ear molds, and some expensive peppermint bark.

While my venture to stump the genius was fun especially when the genius tried to tell me that OS X.5 was built on a new technology… he just didn’t understand how we could think Unix wasn’t created this year….   While I was dishing out some teasting I got a taste of my own when a kid under 8 had to help me connect to the Internet with the  macbook pro. 

In my defense, the power was out in our office and that resulted in the sites I was trying to connect to being offline… but his squeaky voice explaining how to use Safari was too much for Jeremie, Ben and Dave not to give me a hard time.

Ben and Harold had some fun getting molds made of their ears for their IEM (In Ear Monitors).  We talked up how they might loose their hearing or even have the mold composite get too hard in their ears to pull it back out, but that didn’t phase them, too much…

I had the opportunity to try out the new Sensophonics IEM system.  It boasts in-ears that have microphones to pickup ambient sound.  I didn’t believe the quality would be very good… but i was pleasantly surprised… but for $2k they should be good… a little too much for our budget
All in all, a really great day (minus the power outage at home)!  The leadership team at NWCC knows how to give an awesome Staff party!

SharePoint Training for Consultants and Vendors Open

As mentioned previously, the SharePoint Training is now open to Vendors and Consultants who serve the church market.

The price for the training for individuals in the for-profit sector is $2495 ($1000 discount by Bill English for our event).  This includes the Course, Courseware, Snacks and Lunch during the 5 day training.

The registration is now open.  If you have a consultant who serves your church have them register along with you and attend the training together.

Register Now

Growing Pains-Building for the future

Well as many of you know our new Server Room/Datacenter is in the construction phase.  Yesterday the Electricians were on site to wire in the additional ATS (automatic transfer switch) for the generator, which is great…   We have to install the new ATS so we can have the entire power load of the new Datacenter on the generator….

Well we might say that is all good news… Except our staff was off campus all day for our Staff Christmas party and I found out after the fact the electricians cut the power that feeds the existing ATS.  This ATS powers our emergency lighting and temporarily parts of our old Server room. 

Well long story short our soon to be replaced battery backups don’t last 45 minutes and they are consumer grade units so the software doesn’t scale to the number of devices we have plugged into them….so take a guess what happened.

Can anyone else guess what time the power went out?

We can’t get relocated to the new Datacenter soon enough!

XM and Sirius Merge?

Satellite Radio may soon never be the same, the two competitors are making plans to operate as one company.   Serius’ shareholders oked the purchase of XM for $5 Billion.  Will this help or hurt the satellite radio industry?

Free from Dell!

Recently we have had some issues with our orders from Dell.  We placed an order for several monitor mounts for our new DataCenter along with KVM extension cables for the monitors.  I gave very specific instructions as to what cables and mounts we wanted.  When the cables arrived they were Belkin KVM cables to connect the KVM to the servers… not what we wanted. So contacted Larry, our Dell Parts Specialist, to set up the cable RMA. 

One funny note, after we setup the RMA someone else called from Dell offering me 20% off the price of the cables we were RMAing if we would just want to keep them for another use… i declined that ‘generous offer’.

Then Larry did something really cool, he emailed me and told me because there was so much trouble getting the monitor mounts SKUed up and the cables were wrong he would try to ship us the cables we wanted for free to say ’sorry’… well Dell didn’t carry the cable we needed. So Larry writes back and says just pick something off the Dell website that is less than $99 and he would give it to us since they value our business… and even send it next day.

Well there isn’t too much on the Dell website that is less than $99… But Jeremie found a Bluetooth™ iGPS-500 Receiver from Pharos that works with GPS software on a PDA or laptop.  So I asked Larry and he overnighted the GPS receiver…

It arrived today, and here I am being a hand model…Really Awesome Customer Service!!! And Merry Christmas to the Northwoods’ IT Dept…. Maybe it will prevent Jeremie from doing 360’s on the interstate when we go to the next CITRT.

SharePoint Training for Church Consultants/Vendors!

An update to our SharePoint Training we will be offering on January 7-11.

Bill English has extended a very gracious offer for Consultants/Vendors who serve the church.  Previously we had limited the training to individuals directly employed by a church or ministry and no-one in the profit sector, serving a church or otherwise could attend.  Well that has changed.  We are now able to welcome individuals or employees of companies that provide services to the church.

The news even gets better, Bill has discounted the training by almost $1000.  The cost of the training including all the courseware is $2495.

Register Now

Restoring SQL

Our recent SAN crash resulted in our needing to recover all 13 of our virtual servers from backup and has hampered my blog posting, but the blog must go on… so back on track….

One of or servers MIA was our SQL server.  We reinstalled a base SQL installation with the appropriate service packs and then began to restore our databases. 

As many of you know we use SonicWall’s CDP 4440i for our backup.  This is a disk to disk to disk solution that has worked really well.  It has a SQL agent , and we had the agent installed prior to our SAN failure which had been backing up a full backup daily, 3 hour differentials.    So we reinstalled the agent and planned to bring the databases back online. 

Since most were 3rd party databases, we elected to allow the applications to recreate the databases and then restore the data back over the empty databases.  This allowed the connectivity to the SQL server to be restored before we tried to restore the databases. 

SonicWall’s agent has a feature when you select the data set you want restored and you select restore to application. The database is taken offline, restored and then brought back online.

No problems, well no problems except for one database.  Our hourly staff use TimeClock Plus to document their hours worked and that was the DB that caused problems.  For some reason we couldn’t restore the DB to SQL with the SonicWall tool.  So we elected to use option 2, save the .bak file locally on the SQL server and use the SQL restore function.  This option didn’t work either, in-fact after calling Microsoft we still couldn’t restore the database.  When you would choose to restore the DB in SQL you couldn’t find the .bak file when you would browse for it.  The SQL manager console would just display a blank folder.  So we contacted SonicWall thinking the .bak was corrupt.  Engineering at SonicWall had me upload the .bak file and worked on our case for several days with no avail.  Finally they remotely connected to see if they could help that way.  It finally dawned on me to save the .bak file on the e: drive rather than the c: drive since that is where SQL is installed.  Suddenly SQL recognized the .bak file.  I took the database offline, ran a SQL command and we were in business. 

In case you want the SQL command:
Restore database <databasename> from disk=’<Disklocationof.bak>’ with replace, recovery

Some things we learned:

• SQL needs the .bak file on the same drive as SQL is installed. 
• The SQL DB has to be offline before you can run the recovery command.
• Microsoft SQL support sometimes overlooks the easy things. They didn’t think to tell us to move the .bak file to the e: drive.

So once again the CDP has paid for itself, and some experience has helped us for the future.