Testing HaiVision System Right Now

We are preparing to open our 3rd campus and are evaluating some new technology to use.  Our first multi-site we used Streambox to accomplish the live video feed.  This time and 2 years later there are other options.  One of those options is HaiVision. 

They have graciously loaned a pair of thier 1060 6 slot chassis with 2 SDI blades each.

Here is the 1060 Box in my House.  We have been using my house as the test campus.  It has been equipped with the same network connection as the multi-site will have, and it is a good test of being outside our firewall.

For the test we have 2 different video signals being transmitted in sync over 3mbit each... So about 6.4Mbit of bandwidth and we are getting pretty close to broadcast quality video with two feeds.  Here you can see the test setup in my living room.  The two feeds are split on the screen.  Audio is pretty good too!

Next test:  Watch these video signals on some Huge Screens at the church.   The network is working, so let's blow up the image and check the quality. 

Ahh more testing to do!

ESX 3.5 Thin Provisioned VMDK

I have been working with ESX Server for a long time.  My current server has been upgraded several times and apparently at some point in history, my vmfs was provisioned or converted in "Thick" mode.  This means that all my VMDK's consume all the space they "think" they have.  Anyway I was reading about how you can actually "thin" provision the VM's so you can oversubsribe the data volume.  This is exactly what I want to do.

After some googling around, and at least 3 bad commands, I stumbled across the right command.

vmkfstools - this handly command line tool allows from some really fun stuff on the server.  Turns out is supported exactly what I needed to do.  The command would migrate or copy the current vmdk into a new one that is thin provisioned.  The exact command is as follows:

vmkfstools -i mydiskfile.vmdk -d thin newdiskfile.vmdk

After the disk copy is complete, you can delete the old "fat" or "thick" disk and then use the VMWare console to delete the old disk and re-attach the new "thin" disk.  Was able to free 50% of the space on ESX Server using this method.  It is a little time consuming, but if you are crunched for space, you can't beat it.

Theoretically, there is a way to convert the VMFS volume so that all new disks created are created in "thin" format.  I have been unable to get that working so far.  Additionally, if I had an awesome SAN that sported thin provisioning I wouldn't even have to care about this, but for now, this is about as thin as I can get!

Fall CITRT

Listening in to the first Round Table talk at Fall CITRT.  Talking a lot right now about Macs and how the Church should and could support them.

Great ideas about centralizing the support of Macs, and bringing them into the fold of the centralized IT Support.

More to come!

My First Adobe Air Application

I just finished my first Adobe Air Application. It is a simple bitrate calculator. It can be downloaded and installed and will allow you to compute the size of a video file given a specific bitrate and duration (minutes, seconds, hours). You can download a copy of my Bitrate Calculator here:

Download CK's Bitrate Calculator

You will also need the Adobe Air Runtime for this to run.

Since I haven' t been able to buy a Digital Signing Certificate yet, this application will come up with a bunch of "issues", but it is a valid working program.

CCM's First Volunteer Night Results

CCM hosted the first ever Volunteer Night last night, and it was wonderful.  Inspired by conversations with Jason, I held our first volunteer night and we had 4 great volunteers come on board.  From upgrading firmware on a couple of our servers to installing some new network switches to a new Color Laser Printer being deployed, it was an all around great night.  Thanks one and all for coming and being a part of this.  We'll do this again in October.

Going 64 Bit Finally

I bit the bullet yesterday.  My laptop was due for its 4-6 month reload.  I have been a pretty die hard Windows XP man for a long time, and have had lackluster success with 32bit Vista.  I took the plunge and loaded Vista 64 Bit Business, and I have to admit... So far I am impressed.  Of course I turned all the GUI CPU sucking pretty stuff off, but so far I am truly impressed.  It is running at least as well as Windows XP did.  I will know more today when I get Visual Studio fired up and start doing some real work on this box.

Time to Amp up our Streams

We are pretty busy over here right now and the time has come to up our bandwidth again.  I was just about to pull the trigger and bring another 100mbps server online at theplanet.com, when I decided to call them.

We have consistently been burning the 100Mbps on our 1 server and then we have been also been burning a bunch on the church network.

After my call with them today I found out that they can upgrade the 100mbps port to a 1gbps port, and it only cost $35 / month more than we are using now.

Right now they are re-provisioning my server into what they call a "Virtual Rack" that will provide us with a 1gbps server on the Internet.  This keeps my web streaming solution really simple, while still allowing us to grow.

I still have to deal the 2500GB of transfer / month, but I can always up that later!  If you are streaming and need more bandwidth, I don't mind sharing that we are doing all this at theplanet.com for < $250 / month.  It's a full server, full access, and awesome technical support!

Taking Overland SAN for a Test Drive

We received an Overland Ultimas 1200 about a week ago that our vendor is loaning us so we can take it for a test drive.  This 9TB beauty is pretty quick.

Initial Impressions:

• It was very quick and easy to setup.
• Has a "fully" redundant setup, dual power supplies, controllers, etc.
• It is easily expandible via SAS interconnect to additional chassis.
• Is Fiber Channel - some of you might not like that, I'm still on the fence.
• Supports all the normal SAN stuff (Online Expansion, Snapshots, etc)

Having worked with some higher end Fiber Channel SANS in the past, this one is quite easy to setup.  Disk groups and LUN configuration can be done very easily through the integrated web interface.

We have successfully connected 2 different LUNS to our VMWARE ESX server.  Since we currently are only running 1 ESX box I can't fully test VMOTION or the other high end capabilities, but the docs say that it is all there.

I will share more thoughts later.  Right now I am really pouring over the data... ISCSI or Fiber Channel???  I know many of you are die hard ISCSI people, but I have used both, and I loved the raw speed that is there in FC... I know I probably don't need it, and with 10Gb Ethernet on the horizon who knows.

 

Oh well more to come on the SAN Saga.

TS Fay Floods My World

  Well...  I am totally flooded in my house right now.  We have been flooded in since last night.  We still have power, but internet went down earlier today, as did cable.  I am writing this through my cell phone.

Here are some photos of my house and the neighborhood.  The blessing is that we have had no damage to our home yet.  We can't drive anywhere.  The road is about 18 inches deep in water.  Some parts of our neighborhood are knee high and higher water.

Here is the street and yes that is the sidewalk completely under water.

The great news is that my server room is up and running and there is no water damage at the church. 

Home From Nicaragua

I just got home this past wednesday from a 7 day mission trip to Nicaragua.  It was a blast.  The mission team did well, the weather was good, and you could just see the hand of God over all we did.  Our team was able to do a bunch of classic mission trip activities, and I was able to re-work a bunch of the wireless network while I was there.

 

Good to be home.

Flash Streaming Launched!

This weekend we launched our new media player based on Adobe Flash Media Server 3 and our own "customized" flash swf.  The response to our "Beta" has been overwhelming.  Right now there are 88 connected via the new stream.  We are excited to add this since it expands our Mac support as well as simplifying the end user experience.  Check out the beta:

This player interface will be the new default for the entire website over the course of the next week.  If you want to see it in action head on over to http://www.calvaryccm.com

Cool Tool: IE 7 Pro

I am always in the market for something really cool that enhances the way I work on daily basis.  Enter IE7Pro, this has been a pretty cool find for me and my staff.  It adds a bunch of Firefox Features into IE7.  Now before I go any further... Please don't crucify me if you are a FireFox fan.  I have it on my laptop and I like it, but to be honest, I am still an IE man.

So IE7 Pro adds a bunch of time saving things from a fully fledged download manager, inline search, spell checking for forms( I LOVE THIS!!!), and some other cool widgets like windows resizing and just a bunch of stuff that otherwise takes lots of tools to get.

Check it out.  http://www.ie7pro.com/

Expanding Sharepoint on the Web

In a previous article I talked about how we, at CCM, have taken our Internal WSS 3.0 (Sharepoint - Free Version), and are now publishing the Church Calendar to the Internet in a live fashion using Web Services.  Yesterday was a great day for us when our programmer completed our second Sharepoint on the Web project.

One of my big pet peeves is that data should always be current and we shouldn't have to enter it more than once.  Our staff directory on the web always seemed to lag far behind all our other systems.

So enter Sharepoint.  We had already been keeping all our staff contact information in a WSS list, so to me it's only natural to connect that data to the web site as well.

After some frustration and little work we now have a fully functional staff contact list that is searchable, and always up to date on the website.  Thanks to Richie the programmer (who I am encouraging to start a blog and share more howto) for getting this all online.

Check out our new Staff Contact List on the CCM Website!

Cool Tool: Xobni

Xobni is totally changing the way I look at email.  This really cool tool that indexes and analyzes your email flow both in and out.

Check it out...  Find out who you email the most!  Find and track how many emails you send and receive from each contact.  This is a really cool analytics engine and indexer for Outlook...

www.xobni.com

VMWARE ESX Host Backups: Easy and Free

I don't if anybody remembers, but about a year ago, one of our really cool Dell servers decided to go belly up.  Now mind you it was our *most* redundant server.  The raid card blipped out and wrote bad data across 2 disks of our raid 5 array, thus destroying the array.  We were pretty good about backups, but the bad news was that this array contained all of our VM Hosts.  Now the data for each host was safe because we did per VM backups of exchange, databases, etc....but the fact remained that we just lost 8 VM's all of which would have to be rebuilt by hand, and then restore the data to each of them.

Not the end of the world, but the next 36 hours were full of caffeine and very painful.

Introducing ESXpress.  This software has revolutionized the way we backup our ESX server.  It automatically backs up each VM Full Host every night.  We do a full backup of the Host on Thursdays and it does block level Delta's the other nights of the week.  We have the system configured to compress and backup to our live backup server using FTP.  Basically it requires very little room on the ESX Server and it finishes our backups very quickly at night.

THE BEST part is, it can be installed and configured in about 10 minutes, and you don't need a VMWARE degree to get it done.  All you need to do is visit their site and download the package.  They have an 8 minute video that will walk you through the entire installation.  The only other thing needed is a place to dump the backups.  I tried some of the options, but we opted to install an FTP server on our Backup box and then it was easy as pie.  Configure EsXpress to dump to that FTP Server, and wait for results.

WARNING: Make sure you keep track of how much disk space this uses.  In the FREE mode the system doesn't automatically clean up old backups.  If you buy the basic LE license you get the added feature of it cleaning up the backup folder...Very nice, very worth the money.  They offer a 15% discount for Non-Profits.  This means the basic LE license is around $425.00.  I will tell you we have run the free version for about 6 months with no problems, but we are going to purchase the Pro Version next week to take advantage of faster backups, and also to gain the advantage automated cleanups.

National Day of Prayer

Today is the national day of prayer...  Keep our country in prayer today!  Churches and organization all over the country will be meeting at noon to pray for the nation!

Laminin

I was sent this email this morning about a Laminin.  Laminin is a cell adhesion protein in your body, but the really cool this is the shape of this cell.

This brings Colossians 1:17 to a whole new life. "He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together."  This protein holds cells together.

Almost like Jesus Christ stamped you and I with "Made by God."

 

Here is a video from GodTube where Louie Giglio talks about meeting a molecular biologist who introduced him to Laminin.  How Great is our God!

 

http://www.godtube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=152b5103d741aca61093

 

 

Be Blessed Today!

Budget, Budget, Budget 2008

Well, it's that time of the year again.  Today wrapped up round 1 of the budget.  I am trying to get some fresh ideas and insights from God about what we need to do and what we can wait to do this year.

In that vein, what's the coolest idea everyone has for 2008-2009.  I realize some of you may have already done your budgets back in January, but we run from July-June, so we are heavy into the Budget right now!

2008 will be a year of simplifying for us.  We are looking at a lot of projects on how we can further use technology to simplify the many process around here.  Our Sharepoint Calendar Project, is one of these.  We are moving away from 12 calendars and moving (very quickly) towards 1 master calendar with lots of views.

This is just one of the projects.  If you want, share your coolest project...

The NEEKO Project

About a month and half ago my wife and I did what we said we would never do...Get a pet.

 

So everyone was totally surprised when I wanted to get this little guy.  This is Neeko - the name came because my darling wife thought he looked like a Nicholas, but the Greek (not geek) in me wanted something more fun...Thus NEEKO!

 

We have been busy the last 6 weeks with potty training and general training, but as of this moment he has learned the following:

• Sit
• Lay Down
• Paw (our version of shake hands)
• Rollover
• Come

Maybe not as exciting as a new server, but he has definitely changed our world. Neeko has been a huge hit at the office.  He loves to visit the server room and chew (DOH) on Cat 5 cables.  My staff loves him, so do I.

 

More to come this new endeavor in our lives.

Taking Sharepoint Calendars to the Web

There are many times in my career that I have ideas, and this is no exception. About a year and half ago, I had an idea... An IT guy idea. Lets get the data in one place, and then connect everything to that. As a truly lazy computer person, I hate, abhor the idea of repetitive tasks...That's why I like computers.

About a year ago, I shared an idea with my programmer about publishing a Sharepoint calendar to our website live...embedded in the page with no visible links back to Sharepoint.

About a month ago, my programmer, Richie, came back to me and wanted to tackle the project. About two weeks our beta went online, and last week we went live with a new breed of calendar.

http://www.calvaryccm.com/community/eventscalendar.aspx

This link takes you to a Flash Calendar that is reading it's data from Sharepoint WebServices on our back end Sharepoint site (our Intranet), and pumping in to the Flash App as an XML Document.

What is so totally cool about this is that it allows all of our ministries to publish their calendar information through standard methods (ie Sharepoint), and not have to learn something new. We are working on expanding this idea to include Categories (Each Ministry) and some of our larger venues as locations. We are also incorporating some really cool filtering so that each ministry can have their own calendars still based off the original idea.

When I found out that there were 12 calendars that all needed to be kept current...Well that blew my mind.

Thanks Microsoft, Thanks Sharepoint, Thanks Richie.... My hat is off to you for making this happen.

More to come on the Publishing Sharepoint Idea.

Windows Live Writer

Per a suggestion from another blog, I am posting my first time using Windows Live Writer. So here goes.

I have officially begun using Windows Live Writer. WOW... We are using a CMS called SiteFinity, and I have been reading on thier Forums that they will begin supporting Windows Live Writer and other API driven apps later this year... I can't wait... How totally cool.

You can download Windows Live Writer for free from:

http://get.live.com/writer/overview

Definitely a Cool Tool... I have to give props to Jason Powell from Granger Community Church. I first read about Window Live Writer on his Blog... Check him out to: http://jpowell.blogs.com/

Anyway... Back to Live Writing!

Exponential 08 Conference

I am at the Exponential 08 Church Planter's conference with 4 other guys from the Church. My home is looking to launch our second multi-site church, and I am here with a team that would be responsible for launch the second multi-site.

Yesterday Andy Stanley gave a great session on establishing and communicating clear vision. This morning I am in a session mostly geared towards more traditional planting, and not so much in the multi-site.

I will say that this is my first ministry (not technology) church conference. I am amazed at how much and many people are productizing (my new word) the works of God. I am not knocking people needing and wanting help in launching new churches, but we must all remember that it isn't our job to get people to church... That is the work and responsibility of the Holy Spirit. It is our job to introduce people to the Truth!

Anyway enough of my ranting about all this. There is a lot of good material here also... Like one of my mentors told me... Eat the meat, spit out the bones!

Clearing Flash Cache

Sometimes it seems we empty everything we can but still that little flash item won't refresh. This has bugged me for years whenever I've done web development, but sometimes it's just good to know you can flush the "Flash" cache.

My web guy emailed me this today:

If you’re viewing a website, and are having problems with any flash application, use this web page below from Adobe to clear saved flash content on your machine.

http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager07.html

Go to the website storage settings tab and select “delete all sites”.

This will effective allow you to flush all Flash stuff from your computer. I was surprised how much there was!

Splunk on Windows

I haven't posted in a while, so here's a catchup. I just started playing with Splunk. Basically it allows you to capture all your events, logs, etc into one search engine. I am pretty impressed so far. We have implemented the Windows Version in a VM, and are using Snare on Windows Servers as the agents to report windows info into Splunk.

So far I have the server configured and running and agents running on the Following:

• 1 Windows File Server
• Juniper Firewall
• Dell 6024F Core Switch

One really cool thing in my book is that Splunk can act as a central Syslog server, so all us windows people can start using this cool tool for device reporting and error monitoring in one central place.

Last cool thing is that it is free up to 500MB of log data per day... I'm not coming close to that!

Optimizing Windows Media Streams

Our internet streaming is powered almost exclusively by Windows Media Streams. We stream a High, Low, and audio streams.

Our High bitrate = 323Kbps
Low = 160Kbps
Audio = MultiFormat 64Kbps, 23, 8

Everything has been great until recently when our streaming numbers have begun pushing 600 per weekend. We get reports of strange timeouts and other network related issues.

After doing some research, I have some key items to share with anyone interested for improving Windows Media Streaming Quality for the end user!

1. Send your stream from encoder to Windows Media Server Via HTTP. This will ensure your get the full stream delivered to distribution point.
2. Change your WM Encoder to use a set maximum packet size. Under the tabbed options for the encoder you can set the maximum packet size to something a little lower. I am using 1400 and it is working really well.
3. On your windows media server... Under the server->Unicast Stream Writer->Properties you will want to set your maximum packet size to 1400 as well.
4. On each publishing point, you should set your startup bandwidth to something less than the default 3500. (I use 512.) If you don't do this, when your system gets towards the upper end of bandwidth use, people get bumped while someone else is connecting.


There are some other things that can cleanup streaming performance, such as network path between encoder and distribution server, firewalls, and the like, but this is mainly focused on the encoder.

One Talent for Jesus

So what do you do when your Senior Pastor has an idea at 5:00 AM in the morning about a sermon illustration he wants for the weekend... We Deliver. He emailed the creative group asking for a transformation of a one dollar bill into a Jesus Dollar Bill. This was a fun project with Photoshop. Here's the outcome: