It’s been a crazy week this week.

Jeff, my summer intern, finished up last week and is now headed to Mount Vernon for school.  He added a great deal to what we were doing here in terms of video, and he’s going to be missed a LOT.  Consequently, I’ve been picking up some slack in the video area. 

I’ve been kicking around the idea of turning this blog into more of a “general church tech” deal instead of strictly IT.  Why?  Well for me, it definitely matches my job a little more.  My title is IT Director for sure, but I have a good deal of involvement in all things technical around the building, from our Symnet audio network to our lighting, and even our HVAC system at times.  It keeps me busy, but it’s very rewarding from a learning standpoint.  I haven’t made a final decision on shifting the blog yet, but by the end of the week I’ll have my mind made up.

I’ve had the opportunity to get back into music lately, and I’m loving it.  For me, this means, playing bass guitar, drumming, working on ProTools projects, and sometimes even singing.  I’ve had the opportunity to fill in the past couple of weeks with the worship team, and it’s been nothing but a blast.

So that’s a little snapshot of what I’ve been up to, in case you’ve been wondering why the posts have ramped down as of late.  If I do end up changing this to a “general tech” blog, you can bet I’ll have more to talk about.  We’ll see how that goes.

…And I don’t mean ”decorative good-looking”….pretty stenciling on the server rack and trim on the IDFs that match the woodwork or carpet.  That’s unrealistic and quite frankly, a little fruity.

I’m talking about “functional neatness,” if you will.  Wires tied down on racks, color-coded cables to show what is being linked up, proper labeling on every wire and piece of equipment, that sorta thing.

Back in the day I was terrible about this.  I would just fling wires around and plug in what needed to be plugged in and as long as the little green lights were blinking on the switch, I didn’t give a rip what it looked like.  These days though, this is something I take pretty seriously.  Whenever we hook up a new piece of gear or patch in a new workstation, we make sure that things aren’t only functional, they look as good as they can.  So for me, can IT be too “good-looking?”  Definitely not.  Here’s why:

If it’s hard to look at, it’s going to be hard to work on.  This is especially true in the IT world.  If you need to trace down a link, do you want to have to look through a rat’s nest of CAT/serial/power cables to do it?  Of course not.  A small time investment on the front end can save all kinds of diagnosis time down the road.   Note: This also applies to sound systems.  Our sound guys do an AWESOME job of keeping our wiring tidy during upgrades.

Things need to be functional without you.  “Yeah, well I KNOW where every wire goes!”  Yeah, so?  You might get hit by a 1980 AMC Eagle tomorrow morning, too.  Especially in the church world, you need to make sure that the work can carry on WITHOUT you being there.  Don’t pass your wire mess onto someone else just because you know where everything plugs into! (This is also a strong case for…*cough*….thorough documentation.)

Here’s a couple examples of functional neatness. (here and here).  Now I’m not there yet, but this is what I want our patch panels at NewPointe to end up looking like, along with color-coded cables for each connection, whether it be printer, server, LAG, whatever.  Is this something that’s going to happen immediately?  No, not likely.  Next year?  The chances are good.  Nonetheless, it’s been something that’s been on my mind lately.

It’s been awhile since I talked about this, as things have been moving a little slow.  However, over the past week we have made the final steps in getting out video data protected in a manner that helps me sleep better at night.

About a month ago, we installed a PC and drive chassis in our editing room.  This system has 2 2.8TB RAID5 arrays (with 2 additional hot spares drives) that will do nothing but hold video data, SFX, production music, and final cut project files.  We’ve been slowly moving old projects and new finished work onto these arrays over the past couple of weeks.

Yesterday morning, I installed a new gigabit switch in our IDF that serves the editing and control rooms.  This switch also links back to our MDF, and so we now have a much faster link back to our servers.

Finally, earlier this evening, I was able to get our editing storage server talking to our Galaxy Express backup server using some VLAN voodoo and an extra network card.  Our network is mixed 100/1000, so we opted to do our backing up on a separate network.  Since our video server is the first server NOT to be in the rack, I opened up a new VLAN and routed it back to the switch in the server rack that connects the “backup network.”

Note to self:  Time to update the Visio charts of our network layout.  Yippee.

Seriously, I don’t know why I ever considered NOT buying managed switches.  Sure I would save money, but I would be at a serious disadvantage when it came time to do stuff like this.

No, I haven’t been on vacation, things have just been that crazy these past couple weeks.  I’ve had to put my brain in different “modes” so much that when I came on Monday, I actually had to work at getting back into IT again.  I’ll some of what I’ve been doing over the next couple of days.

The first order of business today?  CLEAN MY DESK.  It’s turned into quite a mountain of paper and small parts over the past 2 weeks.  Time to make things pretty again.

It’s been a very quiet week here in IT Land.  Things have been going smoothly, and I’ve been spending today closing out the week and cleaning up where needed.

Around 2:30 we had a sweet thunderstorm roll through the area, and I sat outside for awhile and took it all in.  Afterwards, I sat down at my desktop and saw that my MSN connection was down.  In fact, everything internet-related on my PC was disconnected.

I went over to our MDF to look at the firewall.  It was off and pressing the power button didn’t bring it back to life.  My first thought was “toasted power supply,” but after doing some diagnosis, Jeff and I actually discovered that it was our cable modem that took the lightning hit.  It made more sense, because the cable connection is the only thing in the server room that wasn’t surge-protected.

The strange (but great) thing?  The strike only took out ONE port on our Ambit cable modem.  The modem has 4 ports, and amazingly enough, the other 3 ports work just fine.

Here’s a shot of the cable modem.  It was plugged in on port 4 when the lightning hit.

Here the ethernet cable that connects the cable modem to our firewall.  And no, that’s not BBQ sauce on the end of the cable.

Finally, the nic that was in our pfSense box.  I can’t believe this didn’t go beyond the nic and take out our whole firewall.

And I’ve gotta hand it to Time Warner, their customer service was excellent.  Within 5 minutes of dialing their number, I was able to arrange for a new modem to show up the next day.  Very nice.

Last night’s main event involved attaching a new drive cabinet to our CommVault backup server to increase its storage capacity.  This machine already had 1.5TB in RAID5 array mounted internally, and it was very close to being full, so we purchased a 12-bay cabinet and filled it with 750GB drives.  I also ended up buying a RocketRaid 2440 controller and some multilane cables to make the connection between the PC and the drive cabinet.

The installation went very smooth except for a minor detail.  The controller for the internal drives (a RocketRaid 1740) was causing me a little bit of grief when I tried to set up the new controller.  I was able to get to the BIOS settings for the 1740, but not the 2240.  I ended up pulling the 1740 out of the case temporarily and this allowed me to get to the BIOS settings for the new 2440 card.  Once the new RAID array was set up on the 2440, I popped the 1740 card back in and both cards worked flawlessly, giving the backup server roughly 9TB of total storage space.

Here’s a shot of the drive cabinet next to our whitebox backup server.  It will get rack-mounted sometime in the next couple of weeks, I just have to get some other equipment moved around in the server rack first.

Once we get a gigabit switch mounted in our #1 IDF, we’ll begin backing up our video content across the network to this server as well.  Once all that content is in 2 places simultaneously, I’ll be breathing a lot easier.