And another demo - ChipPC

We have really been getting into demoing hardware as of late.  I have been enlightened by our recent purchases that most of our vendors are willing to let us try out their hardware, its just simply asking.

We are starting a new project in our atrium to build a hospitality center… it should be a really nice place for new people to get information or ask questions… the cool part specifically for IT is the fact that it will give us some more room for our public Kiosks. We have been working over the past few months to bring online registration among other items to our public website.  Along with that push, we want to do away with the paper process in the building of registering someone for something…. thus the need for Kiosks. 

Simple enough, pick up a few workstations and let Jermie and Jim do some magic… or not.  We decided this might be best served with a Thin Client rather than a traditional workstation… and we really started thinking about it when we came across ChipPC’s JackPC.

ChipPC is a thin client that is about the size of your fist. 

It mounts in the wall in a single gang wall box.  It can be powered PoE or externally powered.  It runs a Citrix client or RDP client for terminal services and runs on WindowsCE.  It has two versions VGA or DVI and has 4 USB ports in addition to audio out and mic inputs.

We are currently demoing their VGA flavor, but they also have a DVI dual monitor flavor too.

While we are still working out the costs, this seems like a very good solution for a Kiosk that won’t move around.

Anyone have any experience with Thin Clients in this application and have some pros and cons?  Some items we need to address is how to configure the RDP session so a user can’t ‘get’ out of the session or disconnect from the server.  And how to manage multiple devices around the building… more to come…

Latest Speet Tests

I have complained recently about the service from Comcast… and I think its only fair to complain when it takes 2.5 months to get a couple of static addresses processed… but a new contact, Mohammad has called me several times this week and is putting our install closer to the top of their list… and we get to be the guinea pig on their corporate roll-out with multiple IPs in our area… I have to say Mohammad has been a great support person, and has gone the extra mile to get things moving in the right direction… and apologized about 8 times about how long it has taken… that goes along way in my book.  If a vendor can say they screwed up and apologize that can go along way…

I have to say if they keep the bandwidth speeds improving like I have seen at home over the past few days I can put up with a little lacking customer service.  The speed seemed to be up a bit tonight but I didn’t expect to see the connection at 10mb faster than normal.

Keep the love coming comcast!!!

Crazy Google Results

I was going to check out the the ‘king of Church IT’ Jason Powell’s blog, but couldn’t recall the url.. shame on me.. so a quick google gave me the url… and some other crazy results I just couldn’t pass up. 

I knew JP was working hard on the CIT Biggest looser contest but I didn’t realize he was working this hard…  Now he is doing natural body building promos? I just had to see the youtube video… here is a screen shot from the video.

So much for thinking I would join in the contest late…

Windows Mobile/Exchange Heartburn

We have been working to get our Exchange 2003 SP2 server to provide content to our mobile devices but we haven’t been able to get it to work with SSL enabled.  After about an hour on the phone with Microsoft we found that one simple check box was breaking everything. 

Since we have only one server functioning as our Front and Back-end Exchange servers we had already applied the SSL & FBA work around by creating a new virtual directory in IIS on the Exchange server.  For more information about this see Microsoft KB article 817379.  But the over the air sync didn’t work unless we connected over port 80 and didn’t use port 443.  So needless to say, rolling out Windows Mobile sync wasn’t ok without SSL…

So we first checked our SSL certificates, the wild-card certificate is supported under Windows Mobile 6.  The catch was to import the root, intermediate and wild-card certificates not just our public certificate. But this didn’t solve the problems so a call to MS.

So here are our case notes from calling Microsoft Support:

Resolution

=======

1. We found that KB 817379 had been followed and created a new virtual directory called ExMobile in IIS
2. On the ExMobile virtual directory we found that Require SSL option checked.
3. Since Microsoft-Server-Active-Sync virtual directory communicates with the ExMobile directory on TCP port 80 only by design, so forcing SSL on the ExMobile virtual directory will break the communication and therefore ActiveSync does not work
4. We therefore disabled the Require SSL option on the ExMobile virtual directory
5. Found that on the ExMobile virtual directory it was configured to “Accept client certificates”
6. So we changed that to the default setting “Ignore Client Certificates”.
7. Ran IISRESET command
8. Now we tried to sync the mobile device and found that it was able to successfully synchronize with the Exchange Server wirelessly without any issues.

So maybe someone can learn from our heart burn…

Central Illinois Church IT RoundTable

Do you serve a church in Central Illinois and intretested in participating in a Regional ChurchIT RoundTable?  I am currently working to connect those in Central Illinois for such a gatherings, if you are intersted or know someone who should be intersted leave a comment.

HTC Touch Review

The big brown truck arrived at 6pm to deliver my new SmartPhone, I had almost given up hope that it would get delivered.

First impressions count right, well it doesn’t help when the UPS guy smokes like a chimney and your little box smells like smoke.  But after that I cut the box open and was happy to see the smell hadn’t infaltrated the product packageing.

The packaging of the HTC touch is quite nice, the box slides out of the outer shell to reveil a black mat box with a magnetic lid.  Opening the lid there is the great little device.  Inside the box multiple USB attachments, stili, headphones and the power adapters.

Booting the phone up after installing the battery is simple and clean.  The phone has already been activated and I imediatly make a test call, very clear and good quatlity.  The data provisioning failed, so a quick call to Sprint support and after provisioning the data we are on our way.

Installing ActiveSync was easy and quick, and my contacts and tasks were uploaded from my laptop to my phone.  This quickly reviels a new task of going thru my contact list and cleaning up old contacts and catagories in Outlook.

The applications the a came with the phone include: SprintTV, Office Mobile and several other basic applications.  After syncronizing to my laptop OneNote mobile was installed and works very well.

My initial thoughts on the on-screen keyboard weren’t great but after several days of working with the phone it is easy to get aquainted to.  The T9 is very very good and makes entering text a breeze. 

Battery life is good, learning your new handset causes the backlight to be on more than normal and I haven’t yet run the battery down.  One additional nice feature is the charging over USB even from the laptop.

Call quality is quite amazing for a PDA, I have had 4-5 other PDA devices in the past and call quality wasn’t always great.  The Touch has great clarity, good volume and good pickup of your side of the call with limited background noice.

One of the best features of this phone is the size, granted no hardware keyboard allows this to happen but it makes carrying this phone like a non-pda candybar style phone.

Dislikes so far are only the location of the camera button which is frequently getting pressed when on a call. 

FatPipe or Radware Round 2

Our demo of the FatPipe and Radware continues,both vendors have extended our 30 day trial a few more weeks.  The primary reason for the extension is the delay in Insight - now Comcast getting our static addresses assigned.  The demo day from Radware was good except we had to ’steal’ several DHCP addresses from Comcast since they haven’t assigned us addresses yet.  This worked on one of the boxes, but we didn’t yet test the redundant box because we couldn’t keep the number of needed addresses from changing.  The lag in getting the IPs is because of the Comcast/Insight switch over.  A little frustration is setting in since Comcast has had 20 days to resolve this and they haven’t.  Our contact has communicated they are working up the chain at Comcast, but really how long should 5 Static addresses take…. I digress back to the review.

In the process, Jeremie and I concluded on the 15th of January that we were going to proceed with Radware not FatPipe and we contacted our sales rep and let him know.  He was heading out of town so we reconnected this Monday.  Quickly after we let them know we wanted to send their boxes back the the executives at FatPipe frequented my blog and read our round 1 reviews of the demos.  Our rep called on Monday and asked that we continue the eval of the FatPipe and said we need to do what ever possible to see if we could make the sale… I said I wouldn’t guarantee anything, but we would be willing to continue the demo… he agreed so Jeremie unpacked the Fatpipe.

So we continued our testing with the FatPipe.  The units are easy to configure and Jeremie got them working fairly quickly.  We have added our old SOHO2 Sonicwall firewall and VLaned this connection to a couple test workstations. 

Test One  is focused around a web-stream we receive.  One of our ministries have requested a continuous 1.2mb web-stream, which obviously was just choking our T1.  I have to say, wow a web-stream at that bit rate when you have the bandwidth is quite nice. To simulate a normal user load and the stream we started testing by pulling in the web-stream on three machines at the same time while i downloaded several 100mb files from several sites.  We quickly notice issues, the Fatpipe was routing all the connections out Wan3.  A quick call to FatPipe support and we corrected the routing issue from our configuration.

Thoughts from Test One:there are only 3 choices for routing options on the FatPipe Hardware including Round-Robin, Fail-over.  These options resulted in our testingWan3 to be over loaded with just a little on Wan2.  Granted in a larger deployment you would have more than 3 computers accessing the Internet, but in our scenario the Round-Robin isn’t performing as we would like.  We will test this on the Radware box to compare.

We have learned that QOS (Quality of Service) on the FatPipe is an add on.  Radware includes this out of the box.  From the start of our demos we have told both companies QOS is a must have to help balance the video stream and the other inbound services across the multiple ISPs. Fatpipe is checking into this for us.. we test QOS with radware tomorrow.

More to come… We are working on a matrix of our evaluations and I’ll post those results.

ME part deux?

For the past 12 months I have been saying that Vista was going to be the next Windows ME, granted I haven’t used the OS much.  But my hunch may become more of a reality now that Service Pack 1 is out and includes a upgrade of the kernel. 

APCMag.com reports:

One of the “big” features discussed in early speculation of Windows Vista SP1 was the kernel upgrade, which was supposed to bring the operating system into line with the Longhorn kernel used in Windows Server 2008. And yet with Vista SP1 going RTM, there hasn’t been so much as a peep from Microsoft about the mooted kernel update. Has it happened?

Well the answer is yes it has, and presumably the main reason for Microsoft’s silence on the subject is that as they’re keen to promote the improvements and enhancements to Vista, rather than placing emphasis on a kernel upgrade, which some people might see as a risk of newly-introduced instability.

This might be the back breaker for Vista, since many enterprise environments have been waiting to deploy Vista until SP1.  Changing the kernel might be too much for many environments and will further delay the migration from XP to Vista.  Our environment will be one of those waiting, we had waited until SP1, but most-likely will continue to wait.  While the update to the kernel may result in wonderful things… I just wonder if the PROs  might be become CONs for the credibility of MS’s Vista…  So we will wait and see the facts when Windows 7 becomes the successor to Vista in 2009ish; will we look back at Vista as the solid OS, or the experiment by Redmond?

Funny Phone call…

So recently I have been ‘helping’ our campus services guys remove the snow from our parking lots.  I say ‘helping’ because I think it has been helpful, but I enjoy the snow, and I enjoy trying to assist these guys since they have worked really hard over the past few months keeping things clear during all the snow.

A little background, while plowing yesterday in the Skid Steer (pictured above) every time I tilted the bucket down and lifted the front wheels to put pressure on the bucket a little beeping would start… when I dumped the bucket it would stop.  Mark, or Campus Services Director told me when I asked that was the low fuel alert… Duh, sure enough the Fuel gage had just two bars remaining…

  Fast forward to today….I get a call from Mark and he tells me he is out of fuel in the Skid Steer..I said “Ok… we’ll then why are not refueling and calling me”… he then tells me that the arm for the bucket was up when he was scraping the parking lot, and he couldn’t get out.  What you have to know is the bucket lifts in front of the door, and (by safety design I am sure) you can’t open the door to get out when the bucket is in the air.  Well engine off, bucket up in the air, no get out.  So I came to Mark and Isaac’s aid only after snapping a few photos.

Makes me think… what if… You didn’t have your cell phone, it was 10 pm and you run out of fuel in the Skid Steer… the roll cage would not let you crawl out the windows… Note to self when plowing always have your cell phone charged and in your pocket.

Spring RoundTable Registration Open

Spring 2008 Church IT RoundTable Registration

The Spring Church IT RoundTable will be April 5^th hosted at Crossings Community Church in Oklahoma City.  This RoundTable will be a great follow up to your attending the MinistryTech Conference on April 3^rd-4^th. 

Michael Foster and his team are preparing a great location and we will be able to accommodate a large group for a great discussion.  If you have attended a RoundTable in the past, then you shouldn’t even have to think about registering for this RoundTable, and if you haven’t attended in the past you are missing out if you don’t register for this one! 

The RoundTable will be Saturday from 9 am to 5 pm, but make plans now to arrive early for check-in at 8:30am so the discussion can begin promptly at 9 am.

Date:
Saturday, April 5, 2008

Time:
9-5, check-in 8:30 am. 

Location:
Crossings Community Church
14600 North Portland
Oklahoma City, OK 73134

Attendance:
100+.  If we get a lot of early registrations, we’ll figure out how to raise the limit.

Registration:
Pre-Registration is $15 and includes Lunch and Snacks. 
Registration will closed March 15th, a late registration option will be made avaliable if space permits.

Host: 
Michael Foster

Moderator:
Jason Powell

Room setting: 
Retrying some variation of the “at the table” vs. “in the room” concept we used last year in Houston, but we’ll attempt to step it up a bit to give more opportunities to get to the table.  How?  We don’t know yet!  Expect power, WiFi, and audio in the room, somehow or another.

What about vendors? 
*IT* people from vendors are welcomed, just like any other IT person.  Vendor marketing teams will have their chance during MinistryTECH.

Free Stuff:
There’s a good chance some of some goodies or door prizes from the non-ChMS vendors.

Register Now