It’s no secret that we have some Sonicwall gear…. and we have been extremely happy with their performance. I have found recently that there is an interesting symptom on the E-Class units.

We utilize most all features on our firewall, from intrusion detection and anti-virus to content filtering. When using the content filtering you can utilize active directory(or another LDAP Server) for single sign-on authentication.  This works pretty well but in making some configuration changes we have noticed an unexpected result.

When changes are made to the user account or server used for LDAP authentication, the firewall will start rebooting. This could be an instance when you shutdown a domain controller, or maybe change the password on the account the firewall uses to authenticate users.

I have not heard of any fix from Sonicwall on this issue, but it is definitely something I hope is addressed quickly.

Leave me a comment if you have seen anything like this…your experience may be different.

Here’s an overview of our recently finished registration kiosk project.

What are you doing for your kiosks?

I had an interesting string of thoughts today during some of the talks here at MinistryTech. It was a little seed that was planted during Tony Morgan’s presentation.

Tony’s presentation went over the “10 Reasons Why Techies Scare” him. His number 6 reason was that techies don’t document processes. His example involved the concept of ‘the techie before’ and how we aren’t going to be where we are forever, for whatever reason. And we all have stories of knowledge/processes/documentation that left with the techie before us. So what exactly are we leaving behind?

I think that in order to do the best for the ministries we support, the churches we work in, and the God we live for, we must strive to leave a legacy.

As you may have read on vaious other blogs, Northwoods was the place to be the week of Jan 7. Bill English, the man who wrote the book on Microsoft’s Sharepoint led 35 or so Church IT workers through the ins and outs of Sharepoint.

Fady got the ball started rolling on this one, and things progressed quickly after that. A location was chosen and registration opened. Once we had the time, the place, and the people it was time to get ready.

The big players on the back-end:

Linda Cleveland - Instrumental in the registration/preparation process for the attendees.
Melanie Gray - Made sure there was room for everyone, and that everyone had what they needed.
Linda McMillen - Kept us fed like noone else could.

The training was a great success in my opinion. My mind was filled to capacity and then some. I went into it thinking that sharepoint was just a simple collaboration/portal. But I have seen its true colors. Photo dump to follow.

Thanks again to everyone who came out, and a special thanks to Bill. Its not often you find someone in the private sector leading a Christian business.

Since Jason just posted a photo dump of pics, hopefully I can expand on the events of recent, with some new pics as well.

January 4th: Around 5pm
We begin the relocation by shutting all systems to be moved…and as a show of power, every desktop on the network.(We had a real reason, just some sensationalism)

After everything had been powered down as needed, naturally it was time for a break.

 Now on to the work. There were several reasons for our move. We were growing to big for our current space, our servers were just stacked on top of one another, our backup situation needed help, and it was in a remote part of the building.

After the taco bell settled we started disconnecting the servers and sorting the cables. I documented the process while Jason handed heavy things to Jim.

  As I mentioned before once we got the servers moved we had to sort out some cabling.

The move was on. When I said that our servers were stacked on top of each other there was a system of separating the physical boxes. Here is a shot of our previous rack system.

On to the Datacenter! We prepared for our move by putting the rails in the rack so we could get the servers in quickly. Here we are putting in the first server.

One server down, now its time for a break! We just happened to get a special visit from our favorite CFO Linda. She knew we would be working hard so she brought us some treats.

After that short interlude it was back to the servers. We happened to look at the server we just loaded and realized it wasn’t correct, so we did it again.

The rest of the move went pretty well. No large hurdles, a snag or two maybe. We were able to get everything up and running. We had a little pool between us as to what time we would finish. Jim had 10pm I had 12am and Jason had 2am. While there was some controversy involving certain parties ‘padding’ the time, our finish up time happened to be somewhere between 4 and 4:30 am making us all losers. Here are a few final pics of the move.

After some cleanup were were ready for the week. It’s been a long process, starting back in October, but it feels good to have it completed. Particularly because two days after our move, 35 Church IT guys from all over the country converged on Northwoods for Sharepoint Training.

It’s Here!

We happen to have in our racks the hottest piece of server equipment released this year!

Check out a few pics, more info later!

It has been a whirlwind. Things around here just haven’t stopped lately. Between the phone system move, data center stuff, the christmas production and closing up end of the year things there hasn’t been a dull moment and the days have been long. Here is a snapshot of things happening.

 As you may have seen on Jason’s blog we recieved our new racks and promptly starting filling them up. First with the move of the phone system.

While the phone guys were working their fingers off, we decided to start moving what other equipment we could.

Once we got the core switch(HP 5406zl) in and wired up the phone guys were ready to move our T-1. (Note: Rememer when VLANing that switch port numbers do not increase linearly)

We got the T-1 and our firewall and VPN moved all at the same time and wired up and ready to go.

 When we ordered our battery backup from APC This is not at all like I expected.

The phone guys were then able to proceed through each extension and getting it punched down in the new rack. Looks much neater now.

Once the phone guys had finished, I took a moment to examine the cable they had removed from our previous location.

With all this excitement stress levels can run high, Jason came to the rescue with a great Christmas gift. R/C Helicopters!

Once we had relieved our stress with some pilot action, I was on my way to a rehearsal for our Christmas production and noticed that our lobby was now a park…with an ice rink!

And to end things out we had finagled a couple pans of brownies out of some co-workers but our second pan must have been rushed out of the oven because it was not finished. This is Jason spreading the middle like butter. There are however some who think this is how brownies should be…those people are wrong.

 Things have definitely been crazy round here lately, but the mood is good. Christmas is my favorite holiday and this is shaping up to be a good one.

Yesterday(Friday) I was privileged enough to be able to take part in the Northwoods Christmas party. It was a great time spent with staff in Chicago. I considered posting a photo journal of sorts but then I lost all of that ambition. So here are a couple of highlights and thumbnails of the whole trip.

 I was doing some work in our server room today and a quick glance revealed to me one of the reasons we are in the middle of our relocation.

 I may not remember correctly, but I thought that 80 degrees was on the high side of the scale for your server room.

I just finished up my first roundtable, and it was a great time! We were hosted by Jason Powell and the fellas at GCC, and for my first one it was a fabulous experience. Just a bunch of people sitting around talking and sharing. The combined knowledge base of this group has to be enormous. I have a great set of notes and some action items now, hopefully the Kansas City roundtable next week will be just as good. It’s a wondeful thing for a group of people to come together and share in the happiness and the struggles.

I was able to get a ton out of this roundtable, and I hope that I was able to contribute just a little as well. Now I can’t wait for Kansas City!