Central Illinois RoundTable Special Guest

As you know the Central Illinois Church IT RoundTable will be at Northwoods on June 12 and we are really excited about this event.

I just received confirmation that we will be having a Special Guest.  The Patriarch of the Church IT Roundtable will be visiting the Land of Lincoln and is planning to attend the RoundTable!  If you’re in central Illinois, meeting Tony is just one more reason to attend the RoundTable!

do you use PCO and ACS?

I am looking to connect with others who use both Planning Center Online and ACS.  This last week Planning Center Online released an API to allow potential pushing and pulling of contact information out of their data. 

We have since we started using PCO been putting pressure on Jeff Berg and his team to allow us to synchronize the data sets between ACS and PCO.  Our creative arts team has raised the flag that having ‘people/contact’ information in two sources is becoming very very burdensome.

This makes me wonder what interest exists in a co-op to develop a sync tool for those who are using PCO and ACS. 

So the PCO API exists….  This is just another one of those wishing for more out of the tools that we have and urging those at ACS to help us develop the best tools possible.  ACS, how can we make this a reality? 

Did you know….

I have been receiving a bunch of those marketing calls lately… the kind that they can’t pronounce your name, your church name or don’t know “the person in the organization that makes technical decisions”.  I normally tell the caller we aren’t interested nor do we give out information about our network configuration or our recent purchasing history… Bottom line if our vendors want to know what I (or my staff think) they will contact us directly or read our blogs.

But.. for a random reason I entertained a recent callers request… This call was to ask about our recent changes in service with our Comcast services (see my post ‘more bandwidth for le$$‘).  The caller was asking what we thought about the value for the money, the service offered, the installers etc… then he asked what value do we place on the Microsoft Exchange, OWA and SharePoint Server services provided at no charge to Comcast Business customers.  I responded that the value was 0 since I didn’t know about the offering…

I quickly emailed our friend Lucy at Comcast and asked what this was about.  She sent me a

PDF

with the details that they offer Exchange Server and SharePoint Server as free offerings to customers… Not a really needed solution for us… but a good ‘did you know’.

Quote of the Day

I have been a little behind keeping up with my ‘the Office’ Desk Calendar… I just read the quote for Easter and thought it was worth sharing.

“Don’t be fooled by the term “dust bunnies”.  They aren’t cuddley… they are vicious and if they get into your disk drives, my goodness, they can bring your computer to its knees. They live their whole lives in corners hatching, defecating and laying eggs.
- Dwight

Shame on me…

Matthew Irving noted in his recent post that his and my only connection is via CITRT blogs… I agree with him that there is huge value in the CITRT community, but it makes me think shame on me for not making a ‘traditional’ connection with Matthew.  For several months Matthew and I have said we should connect… but haven’t, so Matthew lets find a date and time next week after the holiday to connect.  No more excuses I agree we have to partner in our ACS Partnership persistence…

Now a challenge to other all "RoundTablers"… We all have come to love the CITRT because of the relationships we have gained…and relationships take effort (both traditional and digital). 

So who have you recently connected with?  Maybe a post Spring ‘08 RoundTable discussion, a phone call or video chat, participating in the IRC channel, posting on your blog… 

The CITRT will only continue to have great success with active participation from the "RoundTablers"…

Talk like Yoda day, May 21st is.

Today is May 21st which is Speak like Yoda day. 

Ask, is the force with you I must?

Like our favorite Jedi Master, can you speak?

In the #citrt channel today join us talking.

For talk like yoda 2009 mark your calendars.

CITRT 2008 Site is Live

The Church IT RoundTable 2008 Site is now live. 

Check out the Site for RoundTable Updates and subscribe to the RSS Feed.

Another Reason to buy Sonicwall?

The FBI is looking into fraudulent the selling of Cisco gear from China via Ebay.  The phony gear is reported to include hidden backdoors leaving huge security holes in the networks in which they are deployed.

Seriously… I have to wonder, wouldn’t it be a resume generating event for even thinking "Hey I just found a great deal on EBAY on a "NEW" Cisco router for $1,100 less than list price".

I love the Problems and Examples slide that the FBI included in the presentation:

ZDnet has all the slides from the FBI giving specifics of the operation.

48 Hour Work Night? Follow-up

After my recent post about our 48 hour work night Matthew Irvine asked what was the ‘Plan B’ I mentioned.  I have to admit we didn’t have a pre formulated ‘Plan B’.  When we realized that the recovery of the backup to a new virtual disk wasn’t going to work we put things back as they were and stopped the SAN expansion so we could go home and sleep on our problem.  Jeremie remounted the iSCSI volume and we left the file server in its original state.

Now for the later contrived ‘Plan B’, we used DFSR (Distributed File System Replication) to replicate the entire file server’s iSCSI drive (drive e:) to another new clean and healthy file server. 

Note that the R2 variety of DFS is much much better  in what it can do and how it is configured.  DFSR actually allows for file replication without the creation of a Namespace first and the replication is much better that the previous version.  (From what I have read and Chris Green tells me). 

Installing DFSR requires R2 being installed, and in our case the file server required us to install DFSR from the W2k3 R2 disk 2.  Even after the install our file server didn’t display the management console, but lucky for us you don’t have to have the management console functional on both servers to replicate the data.  After we installed DFSR on the new server we were able to set up a job to replicate both servers.

So our ‘Plan B’ is currently to use the newly replicated file server as our primary server while we work thru the expansion of the SAN.  One great feature with DFSR is that it not only replicated the files but also the permissions (albeit the permissions we inherited from years of previous use and we will be cleaning up the permissions mess in the future weeks).  Our plan is to remove the replication job, power down and decommission the old file server and name the new file server with the same name.  We have decided to keep the same server name because our laptop users use offline synchronization and changing the server name is easier than reconfiguring the offline sync configurations on each laptop.

After our SAN is in its newly grown state we can replicate the files back to the SAN from the virtual disk with the same process all within the same Virtual server….

One interesting feature we must research a bit more is using a namespace for the file server…  maybe DFSR is a potential topic for Chris Green to ‘present’ during a future CITRT Podcast.

That’s the plan, and maybe we’ll stick to it.

More Bandwidth for LE$$ ???

I got a call from one of our attendees to alert me to some recent price changes with Comcast Business internet and television services.  He indicated that there was some significant price changes, so of course I had to check this out.

After a couple minute call to Luci at Comcast I learned that we could be saving some serious cash on our two cable modems.  You might recall, none of the local ISPs have any available fiber within 4 miles of our location so last fall we elected to add bandwidth with two cable modems.  Since our service was installed prior to the conversion from Insight to Comcast we are eligible for Comcast’s new pricing… Sweet.

Effective June 1st, our modems will now be a combined 32mb down and 4mb up for a combined savings of $350.00 per month, including basic television service.

If your using Comcast Business give them a call its worth asking the questions…

Thanks for the heads up Rich!!!