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Chris Kehayias's invitation is awaiting your response

Chris Kehayias would like to connect on LinkedIn. How would you like to respond? Chris Kehayias CEO at ThinkMinistry Confirm you know Chris You received an invitation to connect. LinkedIn will use your email address to make suggestions to our members in features like People You May Know. Unsubscribe If you need assistance or have questions, please contact LinkedIn Customer Service.

I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn

Chris Kehayias would like to stay in touch on LinkedIn. Chris Kehayias CEO at ThinkMinistry Melbourne, Florida Area I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn. - Chris Confirm that you know Chris You received an invitation to connect. LinkedIn will use your email address to make suggestions to our members in features like People You May Know. Unsubscribe Learn why we included this. If you need assistance or have questions, please contact LinkedIn Customer Service.

3G for 10Mb: We have come a long way!

I sure am glad it's changed.  Thanks go out to Jeremy Dobson at GovConnection for sending me this ad.

CCM Launches New Worship Player

We just launched our new Worship Player. This is a FMS backed Flash player that includes lyrics so the congregation can learn new songs. This player was built for me a consultant I found on Guru.com. Thanks so much Andrew Pankov for building this for our church. We are launching this player today with three songs, and will be continually expanding this as we move forward.

http://resources.calvaryccm.com/files/WorshipPlayer/index.html

Check out the Worship Player and let me know what you think!

The Worship Player is based on XML files that our Worship Team puts together. It is a pretty basic format that time stamps a line of lyrics. The player reads the XML file and displays the proper lyric at the specified time.

Lookout SAN - 2TB Hard Drive

Western Digital announced today a 2TB Hard Drive.  Read More over at ZDNet http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/0,1000000091,39603775,00.htm

Or on engadget:

http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/27/western-digitals-2tb-caviar-green-hard-drive-launches-gets-pre/

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