I was about ready to type up a completely different post explaining tonight’s work night, and I just discovered that none of my permalinks are working.  What gives??

Looks like work night isn’t over… at least not for my WordPress installation.

Update:  After dorking around on WordPress’s support site, it looks like the “Pretty Permalink” structure I was using no longer works.  According to WordPress, this permalink structure requires Apache’s mod_rewrite module.

So what’s up with that?  Did Bluehost turn it off?  Is it malfunctioning?  I guess I’ll find out tomorrow morning when I call tech support.  I changed my permalink structure to at least get it working again, but any link pointing to a single blog post (that uses the old structure) is now broken.  What a pain…

Update #2:  I decided, on a whim, to change the permalink structure back to its original state (”pretty”) just to see what would happen.  Lo and behold… it now works.

This is one of those times where I’m not going to ask why, I’m just going to be grateful.

David Szpunar from Lakeview Church has a great post on Windows SteadyState and how he’s implementing it at LC.

If you’re looking to set up some kiosk-style stations in your building, or any other “public access” PC, you need to check this out.

 This past week has gone by like a whirlwind.  I’m going to try and recount some of what’s happened before I forget.

-  I am GOING to get my motorcycle endorsement this year.  I’m tired of taking the permit tests over and over again.

-  Starting tomorrow, IT Tuesday will happen EVERY NIGHT instead of just every other night.  If you’ve got a hankerin’ to get involved in IT and you want to stop by, give me a ring at the church or email me.  The door’s always open.

-  Tomorrow I’m installing the new drive cabinet for our backup server.  Once it’s connected and online, we’ll have about 8TB of much-needed backup space.  Once we upgrade the switches in our IDF’s, we’ll be putting video material on this space as well. 

-  I’ve been riding my bike with a full helmet for a long time and I finally got tired of it, so this past weekend I bought a 1/2 helmet.  I LOVE it.  It’s much less restrictive and my head feels so much lighter.  The only downside is that now my face is fair game for bugs.

-  One of the best things you can do for your laptop-toting Lead Pastor is give him RPC-HTTP/S access to the Exchange server.

-  We finally have all of our cables off the floor between the control room and the editing room…it looks so clean!  GRANDE kudos to Kathy, Kevin, Brandon, Vince, and Dave B. for helping to make this happen.  You guys rock!

-  I have a tremendous hankerin’ for Sushi at the moment.

-  I’ve recently gotten hooked on 2 shows, which is saying a lot considering I never watch any TV.  The shows?  Monk and Psych.  I actually went and downloaded the first season of Psych to my iPod so I could watch it.

-  I’m still exercising, still trimming down…. trying anyway.  I FEEL much better.  I have more energy and I don’t run short of breath as easily as I used to.  My next step?  I’ve gotta work on that diet, man.

-  My landlord is the bomb.  He didn’t have to put a new air conditioner in my apartment but he did, and the place is MUCH more comfortable because of it.

-  Kevin and Danny have mentioned Big Jim’s already in their blogs.  I went there a couple weeks ago with someone to try it out, and man it’s LEGIT.  The food is delicious, the price is SO right (burger, fries, and drink for under $5!!) and the dude who’s face is on the menu is GRILLING YOUR BURGER.  I love it.  If you’re anywhere near Dover/Phila, you need to check this place out.

That’s all for now.  I didn’t even get to post this on Monday because my internet connection puked, and I was too tired to wait for it.  Aw well… it’ll work.

There’s been some Blog Tag going on through the NewPointe staff as of late, and I’ve been tagged 3 times already. Basically, this means that I am being asked to post 8 random facts about myself.  Here goes..

1. I hardly ever watch TV.  In fact, I watch more TV at other people’s homes than I ever do at my own.
2. I love thunderstorms, which might be a little odd for an IT guy.  I LOVE to sit on the porch and take in bright flashes of lightning and huge peals of thunder.  The bigger the storm, the better the experience.
3. Food fact #1:  I like love to eat vegetables.  I can munch on veggies any time, anywhere.  They’re delicious.  The one vegetable that I don’t care for?  Beets.
4. I am far FAR better at listening to other people than I am at talking about myself.  Not only that, I enjoy listening more than talking as well.
5. I have acrophobia, which tends to be a hindrance when it comes time to pull cable through some parts of the building.  I’m good up to about 17-20 feet, and then I start to “lock up.”  I’m working at this though.
6. Depending on what time of night it is, and how much caffeine I’ve had, I can be pretty easy to freak out if you use the right tactic.  (Disclaimer:  I do not guarantee that my reaction won’t cause you physical pain, in fact don’t be surprised if it does.)
7. I love riding my motorcycle around.  It’s a 400cc Honda that’s almost as old as me, but it runs and it’s inexpensive to insure.  Someday I’ll get a bigger bike, but for now this one does good for me.
8. Food fact #2:  My favorite food?    SUSHI!  I think EVERYONE needs to at least TRY it sometime.  There is absolutely NO OTHER FOOD ON THE PLANET that tastes like sushi.  Just for the record, I also really like sashimi, which is raw fish (sushi is NOT RAW, thank you very much), but at $2.50 for 3 bites, I don’t eat it often.

Is any of this surprising to anyone? 

I was sitting at my desk yesterday when I heard a noise come from outside my cubicle.  I turned around just in time to see a FedEx driver leaving the scene with his dolly.

This is what he left behind.

This is actually going to be a storage upgrade for our backup server.  The price was good (under $5k for the cabinet, 12 750gb drives, a controller and cables), and this unit will provide plenty of room to last us for awhile.

It goes in next week.  Yes, I’m pumped.

I came in this morning to find a very interesting email waiting for me:

“Dude, what happened to your blog?!”

So I cruised over to davemast.net to check it out (I use Windows Live Writer almost exclusively now, so I hardly ever actually visit the site), and that’s when I saw this:

Well golly, I didn’t realize my site generated so much traffic.  Actually though… it doesn’t.

I called bluehost tech support to see what the trouble was, and when we looked at the log file, it was completely emtpy.  VERY interesting.

In any case, the site is back online, and I’m able to post again.  I apologize for any inconvenience this has caused anyone.

I’m not lazy… really I’m not… but I’m always looking for ways to make my job easier.  One of the things that I don’t like spending time on is tinkering with scripts, especially login scripts.

I ran across this script that uses ifmember.exe (available here) to help map drives for any given user based on their group membership.  Basically, you add a user to a security group, and when this script runs, the share associated with that security group is automatically mapped to a drive letter for the user.

You can read details about the script here.  The author, Simon Butler, did a fine job on the article and there’s no sense in me retyping it on my site.

We recently had an experience here at NewPointe that clearly demonstrated the value of having a good backup/data protection solution.  I’ll keep it as short as I can. 

We recently had a bulk of audio/video files sitting on a RAID 0 array on our editing system.  These files consisted of recorded weekend services, logged/captured footage for a project in the works, and all of our Final Cut Pro project files as well.

A couple Saturday nights ago, I walked into the editing room and heard a loud scratching noise coming from the direction of our editing system.  This scratching noise was in fact coming from one of the 3 hard drives in that RAID 0 array…and was being caused by the heads rubbing against the platters at around 7200 RPM.

For my readers who don’t know a whole lot about hard drives, this basically means that the hard drive was utterly hosed, and because this hard drive was part of a non-redundant array, the data on the entire array (all of our weekend recordings, projects files, etc.) were equally hosed.  The hard drive that died was less than 9 months old.

We had a backup solution in the works, it was actually sitting NEXT TO the editing system, but it had not been completely implemented yet, as we were waiting on parts.  It’s impossible to point a finger to any one thing/person in a situation like this… it was really no one’s fault.  Nonetheless, it was extremely unfortunate, and I’m betting we will still feel this loss a few months from now.

I had to break the news to our video editor and my boss that we had suffered a significant loss of data.  In a situation like this, there’s no amount of off-subject banter or workaround ideas that you can come up with that will make anyone feel better.  No one was happy, including myself.  I was actually sick to my stomach for a few hours.

Of course, I did call around to get pricing for repair on the array.  Problem is, the fact that it’s an array make the repair process VERY complicated (at least that’s what I’ve been told).  Prices ranged anywhere from $4500 to EIGHT THOUSAND DOLLARS.  As one might guess, we ended up not sending the drives in for repair.

The ONE positive thing I was able to pull out of this situation was this:  We were moving in the right direction, and there was no one who was against getting that data backed up.  Unfortunately for us, that failed hard drive caught us before we were ready.  Had we not had anything even close to being in place, I would feel quite different.  Ultimately though, it doesn’t really matter.

So I’ve said all that to say this:  For those of you who are teetering back and forth about getting a backup solution implemented:  Freekin’ DO IT.  If you’re already storing critical data on a single hard drive or a non-redundant array, get a backup solution (or at LEAST a RAID 5 array) going and get it quick.  It costs much less to get a decent backup solution in place than it does to repair a hard disk (much less an array), and you never know when you’ll hear a loud scratching noise coming out of YOUR machine.

It feels almost foreign to be blogging after being out of it for so long.

I haven’t been on vacation or anything, I just haven’t had a lot of time lately to think about new posts, much less type them out.

Today I feel caught up though, finally.. *whew*..and better yet, I’ve got some stuff to talk about.

More to follow.