Oct
17
Movin’ On
October 17, 2011 | Leave a Comment
As of 2 minutes ago (9:40pm, Monday 17 October, 2011) I’ve successfully transferred What’s Up to http://www.bsbc.nb.ca/blogs/avit/ . For the past almost five years Civic Fidelity has been kind enough to host this blog, to the point where they’ve held on while I endured a difficult summer of helping my parents with some difficult end-of-life and moving-on issues before being able to get back to my promise made in the spring to move to another host. In the end I’ve been able to move to our own church machines which is not only convenient, but gratifying as having ourselves as a single host solution has been the Brunswick Street IT goal for going on ten years.
While I believe there were originally two partners involved, I’ve worked with Mr. Jean-Paul Arp though my time with Civic Fidelity and been continually pleased with his character and demeanor. This is a man who at about age four answered the door at his house and took my undergraduate thesis to his dad (my thesis supervisor at the time), so I’ve known him, albeit sporadically, for some time!
So it’s time for a different beginning. We’re all movin’ on.
Oct
17
The Mice Will Play…
October 17, 2011 | Leave a Comment
Feedback from our “Screen Play” night of two weeks ago was very positive and in fact we’ve been authorized to install the second screen ASAP! There are still some tricky waters ahead, including hiding the cabling to the projectors, but the eau d’admin appear to be calm and provide smooth sailing.
Fearless Leader is hiding deep in a mine in Arizona this week, and so we are on our own<maniacalLaugh/>
Here’s what we have to choose from:
- Clean up AVIT (we really should do this)
- Label Sanctuary lights
- Update
vh1(invloves moving vm tovh2) - Desktop updates? I’ve sent a note to Carl to see
- Upgrade Openfire We need to do this.
- WordPress network install. I may have this setup by then.
- openchurch. We should play some with this. Kez - you’ll lead?
- Backup untangle configuration. It’d be nice to make this automagic.
All of this, and perhaps less! Out BoM representatives were asking for the draft IT budget this eve (and there was a meeting), so no doubt there will be interesting news afoot by Thursday eve. Enough to chew over with the donuts.
Oct
11
On with The Show
October 11, 2011 | Leave a Comment
The screen went in “just the very best” last week and except for navigating down the ladders at 1:30am Friday morning it was a piece of cake - right Art?
This week we’ll need to work a bit to discover exactly where we want to put the pipe for the projector as well as firm up the electrical and do some touch-ups on the paint on the screen case. Apparently Kez felt left out of the lofty experience of last week and so she’ll mount the rungs this week.
We are still waiting on a reply from a service request to SonBlest. We’ve experienced some concurrency issues with the lastest version and while Carl is excited to get a new(er) machine into the Nursery Checkin, it has to work correctly (funny that…) and so we wait.
Last week Kez and Alex ran a group of cables between the Family Life Centre and the Annex. This week we’ll need to discover which cable is which on both ends and bix them down accordingly (Note to self: identity the cables before running them).
I’m awfully close to being able to auto-backup the vms on a schedule, so we may complete this. As well I need to migrate the wiki database to the central database server as a test for moving the Joomla install. So that maybe on the schedul, depending on the progress made during the evenings this week.
Lastly, we’ll meet briefly with Board of Management Bill about 9pm to discuss our 2012 budget requests. This should give us any necessary insights to ensure that our requests are focused correctly.
Oct
2
Screen Play
October 2, 2011 | Leave a Comment
After several years of consistent convincing of the need for screens and projectors in the Sanctuary, Fearless Leader has gotten us to the stage where the first screen install (1 of 2) is on the schedule for this week!
Our favourite AV Elf, Art (Clarity Sound Solutions, Londonderry NS) will lead the charge up the ladders to mount the screen on the top of the organ speaker unit (cameras are welcome). As well, installation of the projector mount is on so that we can have one side completed by year’s end and ready to install the second at the start of next year.
There may be an additional task if Carl and I make any headway with the SonBlest install. Certainly Pastor Nancy would be pleased to have that bit of uncertainty off her plate!
Sep
26
Budgeting Our Time
September 26, 2011 | 3 Comments
Looks like a bunch of seemingly small items this week, aside from desktop updates - lead by Carl with assistance from at least Kez. Fearless Leader sent me his list:
- Check yellow monitor channel in gym
- SonBlest database issue with Nursery Checkin
- KidzTown Checkin
- Check video feed
- Check login on (note to update-ers: after doing updates as admin, login as the usual user!)
- Contemporary Console
- Fix door on Contemporary Console
- Locate old or build new cable for headphone box
- Traditional Service
- Fix EW video codecs in Traditional Service
- Investigate audio stutter issue in sanctuary
- Write scripts for ‘local’ recording in sanctuary
Some of Carl’s and FL’s lists overlap, so it shouldn’t be as long a list as it first appears.
I have two items for the list:
- Add an existing print queue to samba and implement a script so that the Banner is printed to a print queue and is published to the web site at 6 pm on Fridays
- We’ve talked about the budget for several weeks now, but never get to it. We will begin budget talks at 9:30 pm. Then, and only then, will the snacks be revealed!
Sep
20
Built to Last
September 20, 2011 | Leave a Comment
Last week Kez was on the disabled list and Fearless Leader was off in some Hole in the Wall. Even without them Carl and I managed to make progress on the Nursery upgrade to a new machine and to SonBlest as well. There should be productivity abounding this week with them returned and refreshed. Hopefully the projects that we’re trying to tie up give us an infrastructure with improved resilience, reliability - built to last.
Carl will look after the upgrade to the remaining Kidztown checkin machine. Anthony will firm up the firewire connections for the video capture after we structure the wiring between the Sanctuary Annex and the Family Life Centre. Kez and I will document the cron jobs on the various systems so that we know when not to schedule other cron jobs and schedule user account backups (and post all this to the wiki). After these are done we’ll make a clone the vh1 boot disk and make it vh2. Hopefully this will finish this task and we can move up the chain.
Budgets for AV and IT have yet to be drawn up and so that needs to become at least a list with some rough numbers.
Fearless leader and I have a meeting with Pastoral Staff tomorrow, so there may be some other items for discussion.
If it isn’t too late it would be nice to see about exporting the wiki database from the web to the database server. I suspect that the biggest issue with the move is my apprehension about it 
Sep
14
Oh What a WWW We Weave
September 14, 2011 | Leave a Comment
Fearlss Leader is away this week, so we’ll carry on with the IT side of the house. Up this week:
- Centralize mySQL services. In order to support additional web services (and adequately address the ones we already have) we need to centralize our database on
san. This is an ongoing project that requires some focus, so I may not get much done, depending on the support required for the other items on the schedule. - Finish the disk expansion on
vh2. We need to correct a problem with grub, likely by reinstalling it from a liveCD - Prepare for opening Sunday. There are some grunt chores to do (mostly lugging equipment) to give Fearless Leader a running start at having the outdoor component set up for Sunday morning.
- Enable external drupal/openchurch access. We need to play with the firewall port forwarding rules so that Kez can play with drupal as part of her CMS project.
- SonBlest Upgrade. Carl reports that there are some issues that prevented the upgrade last week, so we’ll need to build a plan to deal with them.
- Formalize building interconnects. I’d like to run several lengths of cat6 between the basement and comms room and terminate them on bix-blocks so that we can manage the limited space in the conduit. Past practice of running onesie and twosies has made it difficult to get additional runs in and forms an additional hassle when we do need an additional run.
- Fearless Leader reports that the call for budgets has gone out. We can start the IT list over donuts.
Sep
7
Breaking (into) our Fall
September 7, 2011 | Leave a Comment
There are at least four things we should focus on this week. The first is running a cat6 wire from the camera in the Traditional Service to the Comms Room so that we can begin experimenting with connecting the camera directly to the server via firewire using extenders.
Carl has been planning the SonBlest upgrade and should be ready to do the upgrade for Thursday. The process involves getting the new Nursery machine up and running (almost done), upgrading the SonBlest database (I’ve just backed it up) and then upgrading the software for KidzTown.
Also on the list is the vh2 disk upgrade that was so problematic last week. I’ll look through what is in the retired data machine and bring in a few 72 Gb disks for consideration.
Lastly we’ll have a conversation about Drupal lead by our resident expert (Kez) about what she’s learned over the last little while so we can start to think about what we can do to move towards managing our web-content.
Aug
29
Pressing On
August 29, 2011 | Leave a Comment
This week holds many options. We were successful last week at transferring vh1 to a bigger disk, so this week will be doing the same for vh2. As well the additional memory for vh1 arrived and should be installed, giving each virtual host a whopping 6Gb!
Unbeknownst to me Carl has been planning to do the desktop upgrades this week, including doing the install(s) of the new SonBlest and upgrading of the Nursery machine. To do this he’ll need our servers to be up and functioning, so we’ll manoeuvre the critical vms so that his project doesn’t get held up.
Depending on Fearless Leaders schedule we may have a shipment in from monoprice.com, including some yellow cat6 cable and converters to stream firewire from the camera directly to the media server. If this happens we will make installing the run a priority. I think he’s ready to be done with the digital video project and this will put it that much further along.
Aug
24
September is coming!
August 24, 2011 | Leave a Comment
Last week was quite successful. Upon arrival we found the second virtual host dead in the water, just like the first did. So while we visited with Kez’s Dad, we discovered what happens when VirtualBox runs out of disk space! Our first item of business this week is to expand the virtual host disk space(s). The plan (lead by Rick) is thus:
- plug in a second (bigger) hard drive
- raise the machine using a live CD
- copy the disk image from the first (smaller) to second (bigger) drive
- expand the disk partition(s) to fill the second (bigger) drive
- shutdown the machine, swap the drives and reboot off the first (bigger) drive
- viola (or so we hope)
We also have the new Sonblest software and should install this on the new(er) Nursery Checkin computer. Carl can lead this charge.
The discussion portion of the eve will have Kez tell us what she’s learned about Modx and drupal/openchurch. With this I think we’ll be in shape to go forward with a plan. As part of this, I’ve installed mysql on san to act as a central database server for whatever web applications (Joomla and Wikimedia at present) we have.
I’m not sure what Fearless Leader has up his sleeve, but video will likely be his priority.
I’ll bring snack based on how warm the weather is.