I just came across this tonight.  I wish this product would have been available when we were in our previous building!

Here’s a link to the manufacturer’s product page.

Last night was another work night at NewPointe.  Here’s what went down.

–> Data/phone lines were run to the kitchen.  This is funny, because I remember doing the wiring plan thinking When will we ever need phones and data in there?  Well here we are, 6 months into the building and they’re being installed.  It just goes to show you, never say “never” and don’t lay down too many absolutes when planning a network.

–> A 12-drive eSATA array made its way to our Final Cut desk.  Since mid-March, we’ve been making it a point to archive video from our services from the weekend…at least one of them.  The problem comes with the fact that our video system is HD (it looks great, but it’s a double-edged sword).  Recording HD video will stretch your hard drives to the limit.  Compressed HD runs about 60 or so GB per hour (which is great compared to uncompressed HD, which is upwards of about 650GB per hour).

Enter the Norco DS-1220.  It’s got some pretty good reviews on it and so far I’ve really liked what I’ve seen.  We loaded ours up with 12 750GB drives; 10 for the array and 2 for hot spares.  The only drawback I’ve seen with this board is that it comes with a PCI-X eSATA controller, and since our MacPros don’t have PCI-X on them, I ended up buying a HighPoint RR2314 eSATA controller to work with our Mac’s PCI-express.  Other than that, I’m pretty happy with it thus far.

Next Work Night:  It’s gonna be a cable-pulling extravaganza.  We’re putting some much-needed data and phone drops into the control and editing rooms, and also taking care of some AV lines in the process.

I rarely use my browser to look at my own blog while I’m at work, mainly because I use Windows Live Writer.

I did see it today though…

 This is definitely not how the theme is supposed to look, so if you’re seeing this please give me a shout, ok?

I’ve recently started listening to the Creative Synergy Podcast, hosted by Greg Atkinson and Anthony Coppedge.  In their latest episode (Ep. 5 when this was posted), they talk about copyright laws and how they affect churches.  VERY interesting stuff to me, mainly because I’m working in video and media as well as IT.  Any church that is working with video, purchased audio, or streaming should give this a listen.

You can get to the podcast notes and the download link by going here.

I rarely (and I mean RARELY) come in on Fridays, but I decided to come in this Friday because there were some PCs that needed prepped for our interns by Tuesday.

We have a base package of software that gets installed on our PCs by default, and until now, it’s been somewhat of a pain, especially when I have to prep a PC that I don’t have an image built already for.

I don’t know what led me to do this, and I don’t know why I never thought of it sooner, but I found that if you run an installer from the command line and add a “/?” switch, there’s a real good chance you’ll see an option to run the installer in silent mode — basically this means no user interaction … SWEET!  Take that option, throw in some scripting, and you’ve got a VERY hassle-free way to install a good bit of software.  There are some rogue installers out there that don’t give you a silent install option, and so those are in a separate folder.  Once those are done, the script kicks in, installs the rest of the software, and also copies all the sysprep tools onto the new machine so that we can reseal it and get it ready for imaging.

There’s quite a few imaging tools out there.  I decided to use SystemRescueCD for what we’re doing.  SysRescCD is basically a live Gentoo Linux image that contains a nice array of tools for disk troubleshooting, partition resizing, and backup.  I simply boot the CD, make a samba connection to my imaging share, and run a script that packages the MBR, the partition table, and all of the partitions up, compresses them, and uploads them to the share.  A separate script will download the image you select, and apply it to any blank harddrive. 

If you’ve got a decent knowledge of Linux (my Linux skills are nothing to brag on), download the ISO and give SysRescCD a try.  If you want the upload and download scripts to make life easy, give me a shout and I’ll pass them along.

There are some days when I come in to the office and get so into a project that I don’t pull myself away from it until I’m near exhaustion.  It doesn’t happen often, but it happened on Wednesday night.

When we put our control room together back in November, we didn’t really have much structure as far as file sharing between the Macs (we run an Apple control room, y’all).  There was no set location for incoming media files to go, and every machine was wide open, always logged on as Admin.  After taking some time to plan out what computers needed access to what, I headed upstairs on Wednesday afternoon to start re-tooling things.  Somewhere between 3:30 and 4:00am Thursday morning, I finally had things working how they needed to be… shares are being auto-mounted at login, the machines automatically log into accounts that don’t have admin privileges, and all the software (Final Cut, Pro Presenter, Keynote) all seem to be working fine.

On Thursday afternoon, we were able to put the new setup to the test.  Cindy and Jane headed to the control room to assemble song lyrics and message graphics.  So far, everything seems to work great!

This is probably the most important thing that happened for me this week.  The more I learn about systems and how they need to function (and I’ve got so much to learn), the more I realize that these systems need to work their best when I’m NOT around!  The Macs in the control room are a huge part of what we do on the weekend, and I’m feeling pretty good that Wednesday night’s project turned out as well as it did.  It was worth every ounce of lost sleep (which I didn’t start to regain until late Thursday afternoon).

Over the past 3 weeks, we’ve been test-driving Service Desk Plus, a sweet helpdesk application that handles tickets, inventories, purchase orders, and just about any asset that could be combined with a PC.  We’ve also been using this program to take care of tickets for facility-based issues.  While I will say that SDP isn’t really built for facility management, it’s more than adequate to suit our needs.  The biggest win so far for our Facility Director is the ability to create preventive maintenance tickets, which will recur on whatever time period you specify.

During our trial, everyone that had the chance to use SDP had plenty of good things to say about it, and there were a lot of features that while we didn’t get to touch during the trial, we’re pretty pumped about.  That being said, this week we decided to ink a purchase order to buy a yearly subscription to Service Desk.

I’m very pumped about this step forward in our operations, because it’s going to benefit the staff as a whole.  We’ve needed a solid ticketing solution for some time now, and I feel like now we’ve got it (or at least we’re MUCH closer).

I feel like some of my recent posts have had a recurring theme:  BUSYNESS.  I remember back when I started this blog in February, I was doing a post every couple of days.  I’d like to get back to that, I really would.  :-) 

I think for the first time as an IT guy, I’m actually feeling overwhelmed by everything that’s going on JUST in IT.  It looks good and functional on the surface, and we don’t have helpdesk tickets piling up or anything, but there are a lot of maintenance items to take care of right now.

I’m gonna split up the week’s goings-on into different posts, just to cut back on size.

Anyone that works in video production knows that sometimes the pace can be maddening… looming deadlines, crazy shoot appointments, and endless editing tasks can add up to a lot of stressful times.

Seriously…I really enjoy what I do, but there are times when the workload is crazy.  And when the workload is heavy, it’s just hard to grow.  Face it, it’s just HARD to look ahead and think of growth when you’re in a constant struggle just to keep your head above the water.

There have been a few things happening around here that are worth celebrating.

-  I’ve gone off-staff as Media Director.  OK, so this wasn’t so recent (mid-March, I believe), but was the first in this string of events.  After a re-organization of the staff, my job changed from IT and video production to solely IT.  This doesn’t mean that I’ve quit video, but it really allows for more clarity as far as job responsibilities and priorities are concerned.  Most of all though, this is freeing me up to think more on terms of growth and the future, which I’ve missed out on for some time now.

-  God has brought some incredible volunteers into the video ministry — behind the camera, in the control room, and in post-production as well.  These people are passionate about what they do and are constantly stepping up their game.  You guys ROCK!!  NewPointe would NOT be the same without you!

-  Most recently, uber volunteer Shannon Bailey has signed on as Media Director.  He will be coordinating non-live productions, from live shoots to the re-scaling an existing video for the weekend.  This is huge, as the amount of productions we’re taking on is ever-increasing.

-  Coming down the pike, Jeff Conn is going to be coming on-board as an intern for the summer.  Jeff will be doing a majority of his work on Final Cut Pro, and will also be filling in some gaps in the IT department.

Needless to say, I am extremely STOKED about what’s going on here!  It’s pretty apparent that God is stepping us up so that He can do some awesome things here in Tusc./Holmes County.  I can’t wait to see what’s in store.

Last night around 6:00 we had a small power outage in our building.  This is the first time that we’ve lost power at all since the building was under construction, and it lasted for less than a second.  I wasn’t worried at all about our servers or phone system because everything network-related (servers, switches, both firewalls, cable modem, etc) is on a UPS.  I knew our desktops would receive a hard reboot, but just this once… shouldn’t hurt them, right?

Well, I came in this morning to find that 3 of those desktops weren’t doing too well.  All 3 of them were EXTREMELY sluggish once their respective users logged in.  I took a look at the processes running, and saw that svchost.exe was using +90% of the CPU.  Very odd.  I let the machines sit for a bit, and much to my relief they calmed down after awhile.  The event logs haven’t turned up anything definite

After looking through MS’s support site, I’ve got an few things to check out, although I do have reservations about trying to replicate the incident.  Was this incident related to the power loss?  It would seem so, given the order of events.  Intentionally cutting power on PCs is not my cup o’ tea though…perhaps we’ll try it on one of the cold spares. :-)  If the incident WAS power-related, it really raises the case for setting a “UPS for every PC (or Mac)” policy.  Under the right circumstances, dirty power could bring about a support nightmare for me and K.  I’ve been hoping to avoid the UPS issue until next year, as we’re trying to run lean in 2007.  Hopefully it can stay that way until 2008.