Day of Silence

Read More

Multi-Site Church: LIVE

Here is a shot of our Saturday Night service at our multi-site church.

On each side of the High School Auditorium our Viera Campus meets in, we added a 10 foot WideScreen Projector / Screen combo, and then also added a 25' WideScreen Projector screen for a center shot.

We are currently streaming both the side and center shots from our main campus in Melbourne, about 20 miles south.







This is half of the powerhouse that makes the multi-site church possible. What you see are 2 StreamBox units, 3 rows of monitors, 2 Camera Control Base Stations and an Opera Video Switcher. Basically we have enough power to run most churches, but contained in single roadcase. The Streamboxes allow us to broadcast the service live over IP at or above DVD quality.

We actually record the service to DVD at the multi-site church.




This campus has it's own band, and both campuses use the same set list everyweek. We still have a couple of timing issues to work out, like when we switch over to the live feed from the main campus, but in general everything runs really smooth.

More Binary

So I had to try it. Jesus (in binary) as the vertical member of the cross, and lord (in binary) as the horizontal member of the cross.

0100101001100101011100110111010101110011

This is a total geek moment, but did you ever wonder what Jesus' name looked like in binary? Where here it is:

0100101001100101011100110111010101110011

That's right, this is Jesus in binary.
And Lord in binary:

01001100011011110111001001100100

So Jesus is Lord would be:

01001010011001010111001101110101011100110010000001101001011100110010000001001100011011110111001001100100

Very Nerdy, but it popped into my brain this morning!
Have a blessed weekend

In Search of a CMS

We recently lost our web developer, so our search has begun for a way to replace him. We are looking at outsourcing our web design with a couple of different web design companies. We also need to look a couple of Content Management Systems to get our site up and running on a platform where our ministries can edit much more quickly than relying solely on the IT team to get it done.

We are currently looking at three different CMS. Ektron (Commercial, pricey), Drupal, WEC (Web Empowered Church), Typo 3 (the base of WEC), are all on the list at the moment... Comment back if you have any other ideas I need to be looking at!

Good Free Duplicate File Finder

Have you ever wondered how many files out there on your server were the same? I have and in my past companies we have actually purchased software to keep tabs on how much space is wasted with duplicate files. I recently found this freeware tool call Duplicate File Finder 3.1. It is totally freeware, and doesn't require installation - a feature I like when working on my servers.

I unzipped the file and ran it on my primary file server. We have 250Gb worth of data on this system so it took a few minutes to run...right around for a while, and returned the following:

What I ended up finding out is that out 210Gb of Data 56GB of it was being wasted by duplicate files. This is just one partition on one server. It will be interesting to see what is one the rest of the servers.

Enable Shadow Copy's on Win2k3

In a previous post I talked about how to restore a file using the Shadow Copy Features of Windows 2003 Server. Today let's talk about how to setup this useful feature on your own file server. This is very straight forward, and should be able to be accomplished in just a few minutes.

First make sure you are logged into your 2003 File / Web / Whatever Server. Open my Computer and you should see a list of Drives / partitions...

Right Click on the Drive that contains the share / shares you want to protect. NOTE: you cannot protect a single share, but you must protect and entire partition with Shadow Copy. Once you click properties click the Shadow Copies Tab. You can very easily turn on shadow copies by simply clicking the drive letter and then enable.

Your server will probably spin and sputter for a few minutes while it prepares the first snapshot. If you click the settings tab you can control how much or little room the shadow copies are allowed.

You can also configure some other options. If you have a multi-drive (physical drives) server, then you can configure your shadow copies to live on another drive...Which is what I do. You can also limit the amount of information that is stored in the shadow by configuring a limit. I highly recommend you set a limit. The default schedule for doing the the shadows if 7:00am and 12:00pm noon daily for your timezeone. This works really well because it doesn't affect performance of the system at all during other critical operations (eg Backup / Church Service / etc).

We have deployed Shadows on all our servers (SQL / Web /Application), and I can't tell you how many times they have been valuable. One time we had a really bad problem with the website, where a bunch of the files were overwritten with some code that just didn't work. 30 seconds later not much was working, but a quick jump into the shadow and voila... we were right back were we were earlier.

Another really cool thing to do is to create a snapshot before you do something potentially dangerous or otherwise problematic on the server. IN the original properties window there is a "CREATE NOW" button. This is really useful sometimes.

Don't ever depend on Shadow Copies as a replacement for Good Solid Tape backups, but they are great for the silly problems that commonly plague IT.

Everything you do, do as unto the Lord!

Implementing LIVE Shadow Backups

Microsoft released a really cool feature in Windows 2003 call Shadow Copies, which allows you to keep an active backup of the files that change on the server in a hidden area and not take up too much space. In the business world I found this feature to be invaluable, and now that in the Church environment, I am finding it to be doubly valuable.

If you have a user that accidentally saves over a file that they open to modify, "you know.... I clicked save when I meant Save AS" -- well normally we have to go get tapes -- load them, blah, blah, blah.

With Shadow Copy enabled drives all you have to do is right click in the server directory ... properties ... and you will find a previous versions tab.

This gives you access to that folder at all the shown points in time. If you double click the folder / file you want, you have options to restore or move to a new location. I can't begin to tell you how many times this has saved me from costly restore operations.

See my next article on how to setup Shadow Backups on your own Windows 2003 File Server.

Disable VM Screensavers

Disable the logon screen saver

To disable the logon screen saver, follow these steps:

1.	Click Start, click Run, type regedt32, and then click OK.
2.	Locate the following registry key: HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop
3.	In the Details pane, double-click the ScreenSaveActive string value item.
4.	In the Value data box, replace the number 1 with the number 0, and then click OK.

You have now disabled the logon screen saver

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/185348

 

 

Outlook 2007 New Install on Vista

I couldn’t use Outlook Anywhere (RPC over HTTPS) on my new laptop. I did some googling and ended up finding this solution:

The issue is with new installs of Outlook 2007 and RPC over Https. From other feedback it appears
that this issue does not happen if you upgrade from Office 2003 and you were
using RPC over Https.

1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit in the Open box, and then click OK.
2. Locate and then click the following subkey:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\RPC
3. If the RPC key does not exisit, Right-click on the Outlook
Key and select New Key and call it RPC.
4. On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
5. Type DefConnectOpts, and then press ENTER.
6. Right-click DefConnectOpts, and then click Modify.
6. In the Value data box, type 0, and then click OK.
7. Exit Registry Editor.
8. Close Outlook and re-open it.