Christmas came and went last year, and when we didn’t have a single flake of snow, I told some of my co-workers that I wouldn’t mind missing an entire year of snow.

Now that it’s finally here, I think it really looks nice. :-)  I just wish it was warmer…

…and I think Todd should authorize the purchase of a 4-wheeler to shred through help manage the snow… you never know when that would come in handy.

Man, I’ve been slacking already on the blog…

Actually, this last week has been very crazy.  Most of it was spent up in the auditorium control room doing a complete rebuild of our video system.  Because our control room was built so quickly, there was a lot of excess wire hanging around (nothing was cut to length when we built the system, because it was 2 days before opening day).  We knew we needed to get our wires cleaned up, but we also took the week to look at the positioning of some of our gear and how everything flowed.  By the end of the week, the wiring crew had everything patched back together, and on Saturday, all of the cameras were hooked up and tested.  With the exception of one genlock issue with our Sony BRC camera, everything went off without a hitch.

Yeah, there are still a few wires peeking out of places, but trust me, it’s much better than it looked.  And yes, if you’re looking close, you see that we’ve got Macs in there.  People ask me if I’m a Mac or a PC guy, and the answer is ”yes.”  I spend a good amount of time on both platforms, so I try to make them play nice with each other as much as I can.

Even better than than the rebuild, this week we officially signed on our first volunteer video director!  This is something I didn’t think would happen so fast, but it’s amazing (and quite cool) how God provides in your need.  Hopefully we can get a couple more people on the roster for directing our live productions.  I know there’s at least that many hiding out in the congregation somewhere. :-)

Here are our stats after being online with Katharion for a full week.

I had to chuckle a little when I realized that Katharion is handling more mail for Parimeter in a single day than it is for us in an entire week.  I also noticed that our spam-to-legit email ratio is pretty low.  Interesting…  maybe we have a bunch of users that are getting email feeds off of forums or something.

I’m still very impressed with how much garbage Katharion is keeping off of our email server.  This not only saves our users time and frustration from sifting through their inboxes, but over time we’ll save quite a hunk of bandwidth as well.  Right now we only have a non-line-of-sight wireless connection, so that hunk of bandwidth is pretty valuable. :-)  (That in itself is another story for another time).

So far so good!  I’ve yet to hear any ill remarks about Katharion’s services, and judging from our experiences, it doesn’t yet look like there’s a good reason not to go with them. 

This past week our senior pastor’s notebook died on him.  No warnings or anything, it just stopped running and would not start back up.

After some investigation, we had the culprit narrowed down to  something between the power socket on the back of the machine the and motherboard.  I put a call in to Lenovo tech support and within just a couple minutes I was on the phone with a living breathing person who was in Atlanta (I’ve called Lenovo tech support before and this is SO nice).

The phone call took place around 10:00am Tuesday last week.  On Wednesday, DHL dropped my return box off.  I boxed the dead computer, did the small amount of paperwork, and called DHL to schedule the pickup.

DHL picked up the notebook on Monday (grrr), and by Wednesday, it was BACK in our office ready to be put back to work.  Lenovo’s techs (in Tennessee, mind you) had worked on the unit the day it got there, finished it, and overnighted it back to me.  Impressive! 

It’s very refreshing to be dealing with a company who values customer support like this.  Who else is knocking it out of the part on the support end?  Tell me your stories!

I took a long nap this past Sunday afternoon, and I mean a LONG one… about 6 hours I think.  Because of this I wasn’t able to sleep on Sunday night much at all, so I decided that I would go to our old building and pick up some tools and other things that I wanted to move to the new building.

We’ve been operating at our new facility for 8 weeks now, and I’ve pretty much gotten a feel for the new surroundings and mindset that is part of our new space, and so I was surprised to be feeling almost homesick as I walked the halls of the building that I used to work in. 

I’m not really sure what caused that, but I think that most of it boils down to familiarity.  I’ve been in that building since my sophomore year in high school (12 years ago).  I’ve seen countless lives changed during that time, and it has truly been an awesome experience to be a part of that.  Plus, I really haven’t given myself time to process this whole transition on a personal level until now when things have calmed down a good bit.

Do I miss the old building?  A little, for now.  Would I go back?  No way, man. :-)  I’ve had so many good learning experiences during this transition.  I wish I would have started blogging about 6 months ago!

In the last post about our 2007 Goals I was going to touch a little bit on all of the goals we’ve set for this year so far.  After the lengthy write on backups, I figured I’d put the other goals in a separate post.

•  Set up a secure VPN solution for our network.  - More and more, we’ve got users (myself included) that do things from home.  Right now we have no real safe way of getting them into our network from the outside, and the idea of having an unmanaged WinXP Home machine (possibly loaded down with malware, virii, etc.) connecting directly to the network over PPtP gives me heartburn.  Currently we have SSL-Explorer up and running, and it shows promise.  My only difficulty with it has been syncing to our AD.  I’ve heard that you need to put the domain controller in the hosts file (and I’m assuming that’s /etc/hosts) but I still can’t get a sync.  I may download the Windows version and see how that works out
• Get Outlook integrated into our day-to-day operations. - Currently very few of our employees use Outlook to do any calendaring, much less calendar sharing and meeting requests.   This year it is our goal to start training the staff to fully-utilize Outlook, as it would certainly increase our efficiency.  As such, we will soon be putting together a training program to get users up and running on Outlook.  This will definitely ramp up support calls, but it will be very worth it in the end for us all to be scheduling the same way.
• Train employees to fully utilize our printers. - Like the Outlook training, this will probably be an ongoing endeavor throughout the rest of the year, and will definitely become part of the orientation process for a new staff member.  It’s not that our people don’t know how to print, it’s that we want to train them to utilize the systems we have in place a little better.  Printing lock jobs, for instance;  there are some concerns about printing confidential documents to the public printers because as of 1/2/2007, we have ended support for personal printers (I smile every time I type that).  Up until now, this is something that we have not addressed because our offices were all over the place in the old building.  Now that we’re all together in one space, it makes a lot more sense to just have 1 or 2 printers to service the entire staff.  In fact, the only person who will have a personal printer is the Director of Business Affairs, who will use it to print checks (don’t wanna mess with that printer).  There are other print-related issues that we need to cover too, like using the proper account to print, scanning to PDF, etc.

The more I think about it, it looks like our overall goal for this year is going to be training.  There are a LOT of new things we want to teach our users, and it will no doubt be a stretch for some of them. (and me too… I need to develop my teaching skills!)  But the good part is that once they’re empowered with that sweet new knowledge, they’ll wind up being more efficient then they ever thought they could be… at least I hope so! 
It’s going to be a great year!

Spam has become a major issue in our office for about a year and a half now.  In April 2006, we installed anti-spam software on our Exchange server in hopes to get the issue under control.  It worked for a little while but by fall we were dealing with spam again, and in higher volumes, too.

Fast-forward a few months to now.  The spam issue hasn’t increased, but it sure hasn’t gone away, either.  However, now that the planning/provisioning/execution of moving into the new building is done (or at least extremely close), I’ve finally been able to concentrate my efforts to different areas now that I’ve “found my rhythm,” so-to-speak.
Getting our spam under control wasn’t one of the top 4 goals we set for the IT Department, but it’s been on the table for months, so now it’s time to deal with it.  I’ve been reading other ChIT blogs and listening to the Church IT podcasts that Jason Powell has been recording and uploading (bravo, man… I need to sit in on one soon!) and I’ve heard a lot of buzz about Katharion.

Katharion is a hosted anti-spam and anti-virus solution that scans all your incoming mail (you need to update your MX records to send through their network, of course) before passing it on to your users.  There are quite a few options as far as mail handling and notification, and getting up and running is pretty simple.

I went ahead and signed up for the 30-day trial around 10:30 on Thursday night.  At 9:30 the next morning, I got an email from a Katharion rep.  They’ve got their systems set up for the trial and all I need to do is change my MX records.  Sweet!  I changed my MX records and soon after that I was on the phone with the same Katharion rep that emailed me earlier.  He gave me a guided tour through Katharion’s administrative interface and showed me how to add users and manage mail handling.

Within half an hour I had added our entire staff to the system.  Katharion supports LDAP and AD synchronization, but we have few enough people that I just nabbed everyone’s email addresses with an AD query and pasted them in.  While we were at it, I also had the Katharion rep add our old domain (sugarcreekfmc.org) as a sibling domain, so that all mail sent to that domain could be filtered as well.

We’ve been online with Katharion for just over 24 hours now and here are our stats:

 

Mind you, we’ve got our filter set to “Medium.”  I’m pretty wary about the 1165 messages that made it through the filter.  We only have 31 mailboxes (and a handful of aliases), so I would be very surprised if those were all legit emails.  I’ll probably check in with the top 6-7 spam recipients on Monday to see what’s in their mailboxes.  This week we will also tighten the firewall up to reject all SMTP traffic that doesn’t come from Katharion’s network.

I’ll check back in a few days with more stats on Katharion.  Hopefully this will be a good step forward in getting spam out of our users’ mailboxes.

This past week, I sat down with Todd Colucy (my boss) and Mike Conn (our executive director) and we discussed our goals for the IT department in 2007. This is something that we’ve not really done before because of my involvement in video production as well. We didn’t just “not do anything” in IT, we just didn’t focus on anything in particular. With both of my departments expanding considerably, I felt that this year I definitely needed to sit down with my department leaders and discuss what we should focus on for at least the first half of the year. This helps me not only keep my focus on what my goals are, but it also help me to be able to say ‘no’ to things that don’t line up with said goals.

For the IT Department, we decided that we would set 4 primary goals to start off and then tag more items on as these goals are considered “accomplished.”

The first priority was to overhaul our backup system.  This was one of those “definites” that we knew we needed to tackle. Our current backup scheme is in danger of becoming unusable soon, mainly because of the amount of data that’s being backed up.  My first inclination is to go with off-site backup, whether that be DFS replication or a third-party hosted solution like MozyPro or NetMass.  Both have their ups and downs to them, so that’s something we’ll be bouncing back and forth over the next week or so.

For on-site backup (protection against drive failures and such), we will most-likely be setting up a RAID5 config in each box for now.  I’d love to get a SAN crankin’ in the rack for all our servers, but it will have to wait until next year.  Fortunately, RAID5 implementation will be rather inexpensive because most of our servers are virtual and can share that space nicely.

What’s everyone else doing for backups?  I would be interested to know.

One of the biggest things that has happened to us over the past year was our relocation from Sugarcreek to Dover.  Not only was it huge in the sense that we were moving to a new building, but we also ended up changing our name as well.  Talk about a transition!  This has brought on many new opportunities and learning experiences.

If you are getting ready to embark on a transition such as this, whether it’s just an addition to your current building or a full-fledged relocation, make sure you take time to consider your IT needs for whatever your doing.  Whether this means simply new cabling and terminations, or more switches and new servers…whether you are an IT volunteer, the Tech Director, the Executive Director, or someone on the building committee, you simply MUST think about what will be happening in your new space and how IT might play into that.  Doing it ahead of time will save you time, labor cost, and a whole lotta stress when it comes time to occupy your new space.

• Never say “never.”- NewPointe has been open for 5 weeks now, and we’re already putting phones and F1 check-in stations in places that we never thought they would be.  Don’t think that a CAT6 drop won’t ever be needed in a room or in a certain location in your hallway just because there are no current plans for a computer or phone.  It’s a lot easier (and less costly) to put them in before ceiling tiles and drywall is in place.
• Plan for more. - When you’re putting together your network, make sure you plan for more than you need at that time, especially when it comes to your switching and your storage space.
• Have a dedicated room for your servers. - It doesn’t matter whether you have one server or 10.  If you’re moving your network to a new location, you need to have a secure place to put them, especially your domain controllers if you’re using Windows as your main platform.  Make sure the room has adequate cooling to keep your servers from cooking.  If you’re not rack-mounting your equipment yet, you should!  There are plenty of vendors out there that sell racks and rack-mount shelves.  We are using Hubbell racks for our switching, and our servers are sitting in a Dell rack.
• Get volunteers involved. - It goes without saying, but volunteerism is key to making things happen in a church.  One of the biggest wins during our move was being able to call on a few volunteers to help take computers out of our old offices, move them to the new building, and reinstall them on the users’ desks.  This freed me and Todd up to get our servers installed in the rack and get the rest of the network up and running, and when our users came in the following Monday, they were able to power up their computers and go to work with little-to-no incident. 

So plan ahead, and do it with an open mind to what the future might hold for you.  It will help you keep your cool during the last 1-2 months of your project when things start getting crunchy.

My name is Dave Mast, and I take care of the IT needs at NewPointe Community Church, as well as video production. 

I’ve been meaning to start doing this for some time now.  I have reaped much benefit from other Church IT blogs, and so I would like to do what I can to give back to the blogging community with my experiences.

So after some thought and encouragement from my peers, here I am.  This blog may not always stay strictly on Church IT, as my responsibilities also cover other areas such as video and whatever else I may get my hands into.  Most of the time, however, if you come here, IT is what you’ll see.

So, we’ll see how this goes.  Spam-free comments are always welcome, too.