Tony Dye

Our Race to Asterisk

Perimeter Church is pretty clearly going to be using Asterisk, or some derivative, very soon.  VERY soon.  With all the excitement of our CRM roll-out, and our general fiscal year-end wrap-up activities, as well as our deployment of Exchange 2007, SharePoint, our new search tools, storage upgrades, revamping our backup tools, enhancing our web site, and dozens of other big things, you'd think we'd be comfortable saying "that's enough for now."  Oh no!  Not us!  We are ALSO doing a very rapid construction project which has major IT implications.

This project involves purchasing an existing building adjacent to our property.  Our current facility is the large area in the lower left, the "new" building is in the upper right:

The new building has actually been a around a while, and it's been nearly vacant.  Part of that is because it's been poorly maintained.  Part of that is because the building has a mold problem.  Not a trivial one.  Our solution is to basically tear the building down.  All the way to slabs and girders.  No interior walls.  No exterior walls.  No windows or doors.  A fresh, naked, building.  Then rebuild it.  Oh...did I mention we started about three weeks ago and plan to move in before the end of August!  Yup, that's the schedule, start to finish in less than 90 days.  Amazingly, the contractor is right on schedule.

Here's the building just at the start of stripping off the bricks.  (A bit of clearing in the top left corner)

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Most of the facing off.  Not done yet.

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Just about "naked."  A little more gutting to do, some areas to treat, some water-protection to apply, but almost ready to start the rebuild process.  This picture was taken in late June.

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Now, you may be wondering what this has to do with our Race to Asterisk.  Well...we're not using any copper in that new building -- only fiber connectivity.  That's a good bias toward a VoIP phone system.  Our current phone system supports VoIP, so I could just buy more [expensive] phones to add to it, but why spend money on old technology when for not a lot more, we could move to Asterisk?  Yeah...we couldn't think of any good reason either, so we're jumping in.

Our first thought was that we'd use Asterisk *just* for the new building, and configure it as a front-end to our existing system.  Do-able, but a lot of work.  When we thought through it, the labor & service charges to integrate the two phone systems just might be the same, or even more, than the cost for the roughly 300 phones we'd have to purchase to make a full move to Asterisk.  So...new plan: get to Asterisk, soon!

Oh yeah...did I mention that late August deadline?  This is going to be a very busy time...

Fellowship Tech Opportunities

(Delayed posting -- sorry)

From: Simmons, Curtis
Sent: Monday, June 30, 2008 11:47 PM
To: Jason Powell
Cc: Dye, Tony
Subject: RE: Seeking a Great IT Professional

Seeking IT Pro with Passion for Tech and Local Church
Are you searching for a career with true meaning? A job that allows you to use your God given talents to empower the local church through advanced technology? A job where everyone you work with shares your passion, drive, and intense work ethic while keeping in check the priorities of God and family before work.
Fellowship Technologies is currently seeking an IT professional with passion for technology and the local church. Click here for a detailed description of the role and experience required. Please pass along if you know someone.
Please send inquiries and qualified resumés to careers@fellowshiptech.com.

Curtis Simmons
2 Corinthians 11:28

Switchvox/Asterisk Reminder

One more reminder: Switchvox/Asterisk presentation & demo THIS WEDNESDAY, July 2, Perimeter Church, noon until 3PM or so.  We have plenty of room if you're interested.  Just let me know.  TonyDye [at] perimeter [dot] org.

HP has Entered the DeDupe Market

Look out DataDomain, Exagrid, and all the others. HP is now in the DeDupe market, and the story is that they're trying to complete with NAS pricing on the lower-end product, the D2D2500. 

Vendor vs. Partner

A couple of people I've talked with who are potential vendors at the fall roundtable requested a different word: Partner.  That does convey a very different message, doesn't it?  It's funny, I can't clearly define it, but I could easily make a list of people I do business with, and some would be vendors, some would be partners.

Which would you rather have at a roundtable event?  For me, that's easy: PARTNERS!

Adequate

How often do you settle for "adequate?"  Not great, not bad, just "adequate."

There's a restaurant very close to Perimeter Church that I wish I wanted to go to all the time.  It is close by, big tables, pretty good service, and sometimes they even have wireless.  But, the food is only "ok."  It's not bad...just nothing to get excited about.

As we've been working on our new Intranet plan, Scott Logan challenged me with "let's not settle for adequate."  That's a great idea! But...what does it mean?

We've been working hard to use SharePoint.  After all, it's the obvious "easy" answer.  And...we've been tremendously underwhelmed.  Talking to others, they've had a similar experience.  SharePoint works, it can do all kinds of things, but it's not easy, and frankly, it's somewhat ugly!  So..with a lot of work, we could have, yup, an "adequate" solution.  Let's not settle for adequate.

We  have a media archiving solution that is, um, adequate.  We have an internal workflow  system that's...adequate.  We have a purchasing process that's..ok, you guess.  How may other "adequate" systems do we have?  Why don't we have excellent?  Perhaps three reasons: 1) We don't know of excellent solutions.  2) If they existed, they'd probably be very expensive. 3) Most of the time, we wouldn't know excellent if it hit us in the face!

What do you have that's "adequate?"  What would it take to get to excellent?

Disk Quotas, Controlling Disk Consumption

Waco Muse recently posted looking for tools for duplicate file management.  Let me just say "ME TOO!" but I want even more.  There was similar discussion at the Central IL Church IT Roundtable last week.  Here's the problem, as I see it. 

1. The goal should not be to save *everything*.  The key is to save what's important, either for now, or for the future
2. At least as important is to be sure that what's saved can be found.  "Findability"
3. Some tools are need that help find (and remove, or archive) files that are not important
4. And, of course, security and backup need to factored in

This is all part of the bigger Information Lifecycle Management topic that I've been so frustrated with over the past few months.  Is it really this hard to find tools to help manage documents, messages, media, and disk?  What rock have I not looked under, yet?

TXT to Email Converter?

Have you ever had a text message you wanted to save, in some other form?  On my WinMobile device, I can copy the text, open an email, paste it in, and send it to myself, but what a pain!  There must be some easier solution.  My very quick search didn't find it.  Anybody else have this need?  Any good+easy+free solutions?

The Backup Dilemma

Perimeter has been using BackupExec since before I came on the scene.  I don't even remember the first version we used on our original NT 3.51 server, but as our network has grown, we've continued to add servers and licenses, go through upgrades, upgrade tape devices, and generally just keep on doing more of the same.

We've been looking at other pieces of the larger ILM picture.  But, backup is such a key.  We have several vulnerabilities right now, or places where we can't move forward until we make a backup decision.  So, here are some of our challenges:

• Our current version of BackupExec doesn't support Exchange 2007, so we're delaying our upgrade to 2007 - that's painful!
• We'd sure like a solution that handles entire VMs (vmdk files) for rapid disaster recovery, as well as individual files within the VM, for incremental restore purposes
• We want something that has a good "understanding" of SharePoint, especially if we ever move forward with using SharePoint as an alternative file store
• Our backup program must understand and inter-operate with whatever archiving solutions we come up with (Moonwalk, Archive one, etc.)
• And, of course, we have to live on a budget

VisionCore's VRanger product, and Bakbone's NetVault have each made it to our list of "interesting" products, and we've been seriously thinking about going that route.

Now, back to my opening statement, we've been using BackupExec for a long time.  Why would we NOT just go ahead and upgrade it, and at least keep on with what we're already familiar with?  In the world of backup (and anti-virus, and even Church Management), where the question is often "which product do you hate, least?," I'm having trouble choosing to make a switch to something new, when we at least sort of understand the issues with what we have.  And, staying with BackupExec has the benefit of some cost savings.

So, am I nuts if I don't make a change?  (go ahead, I can handle it)

Wireless Safety: the VPN Question

In response to my earlier post about wireless security, Stuart made the comment about using VPN to enhance security.

I’ve heard this many times, and it makes sense.  I’ve also heard that it actually creates an even greater risk!  The thought is, if you have a VPN connection, then you have a "trusted" pipe into your network.  But, if your local Internet connection isn't safe, then have you just created a pipe from danger into the guts of your network.  The question (to which I do NOT know the answer): if your notebook is on an unsafe network, how does a VPN connection make it safe?

I've heard the analogy: VPN is like a clean pipe with one end in the middle of a cesspool!  Please tell me how that's wrong.