Travis Kensil - Church I.T.

Got some exciting projects up and coming…..they are….

1) One of my consulting customers will be going to Exchange 2007. I will definitely be blogging about that transition and making notes so perhaps someone else can avoid the pitfalls I know will happen. Also want to try and setup the replication/HA features that Microsoft claims Exchange 07 can do; will be interesting to see how well it works. Both instances of Exchange will be running on my good buddy Vmware

2) Virtualizing Shelby. With our recent push to virtualize anything/everything it just makes sense to try Shelby. Has anybody done this successfully yet? My early tests did not go well but we’ve done some equipment upgrades so perhaps better results will follow? I know reading of someone (maybe Tony Dye or Cliff Guy?) who did and suffered wicked performance issues. So if you have done it, drop me an email and let me pick your brain.

3) SAN/NAS/Storage Decision. Going back to my previous posts we are still looking into a storage solution. I am going to be ordering some more SCSI drives to pop into our secondary Vmware host just till I can get this storage issue solved. As pricing is coming back from vendors I am seeing the iSCSI SAN idea fading away; I just don’t want to try and justify that expense right now. Considering going the NAS route and just keeping all staff/media/tech files on that box and letting our 2 vmhosts run from internal storage. I’ve devised a clever (or at least I think so) way to mimic the benefit of having a SAN for failover should a physical machine die, but without actually having a SAN. What I want to do is make identical copies of every virtual machine on both hosts, leaving one in an “off” state while the other is active. My thinking is that if one box should die I could shift to the other box; grab the latest backup of data and be back up in running in under 30 minutes. For example…..we have our Shelby server image copied to both machines in a blank data state….one is production, one is backup. If primary dies I can start the backup vm, import the latest database and be good to go. Now I just need to begin testing this and see how it works. I know Windows responds well to moving servers; have had some issues with Linux…mostly with networking. Working on some sort of script that can help Linux migrate a little easier; I’ve seen something similiar on the Vmware Communities a while back.

Those are some of the latest things up and coming. Two posts in a day will be making up for close to 3 weeks without postings. Our Easter production rehearsals/programming is just ramping up and the next month will be crazy. Starting next week we have 3 rehearsals a week plus 2-3 tech. meetings. Crazy stuff, but all for the glory!

Hope all of you reading are well; good luck with your Easter productions!

One of the cool parts of my after-hours consulting gig is that I get to see, fix and document lots of weird/uncommon issues. So with that said, I have created a new category for “Bugs/Issues” where I can document these things not only for my benefit but possibly for yours. Yesterday marks another weird one.

One of my consulting customers is a 30+ staff office running Exchange 2003. One of their sales guys could never seem to open forwarded attachments. Initially I made the assumption it was just the security settings in Outlook preventing it from opening; checked those and everything was fine. I then did a simple repair/detect operation thinking something was possibly corrupt in Outlook; no improvement. I tried and was successful at opening the attachments myself in Outlook….which began to make be believe there could be some sort of plugin/3rd party product on the client machine causing this behavior.

Going back about 6 months ago I discovered that Apple iTunes installs this nifty little plugin inside of Outlook that when using IMAP causes Outlook extreme delays in startup/sync.

So with that previous knowledge from the past, I went and checked the com-addins and addins section of Outlook. I noticed two entries, Google and iTunes. After removing both entries and restarting Outlook; the staff member was immediately able to open/view messages/forwards. After some process of elimination I determined the Google plugin was the offending object. After some further research it appears there is a known bug between Google/Outlook. So with that said, here is the official bug fix…

1) Launch Outlook (so far this appears to be an issue in 2003, not sure about newer/older verions)
2) Click on Tools - Options - Other - Advanced
3) Remove Google Toolbar Tick in both Ad-In Manager and Com Ad-Ins (I actually just chose to completely remove them but either way should work)
4) Restart Outlook

Also as I mentioned, the same process about applies to fix a slow load/sync in Outlook when using IMAP protocol for your mail. Instead of removing Google remove the iTunes plugin.

Just thought I would post this in case anyone else has this issue…

About three weeks ago I noticed some of our backups and most importantly MozyPRO was having issues completing successful backups. After some investigations I found a series of random VSS errors in the logs; Microsoft and random Google searches didn’t really turn up anything of use. I also noticed that the VSS service seemed to randomly stop running and never automatically restart itself again.

In the past I have had success, when the print spooler service exhibited similiar symptoms, in simply stopping the service and grabbing a “good” version of the spooler file from either the windows disk or another workstation and simply overwriting the file, rebooting. My similiar logic applied in this scenario.

I stopped the VSS service, grabbed a “good” working copy from another one of our servers, replaced the existing and performed a reboot. So far so good…I have not seen any errors/issues currently because of this. The real test will be later tonight once our main backups and Mozy begin running….both which heavily utilize VSS.

I have not had much time to investigate how this issue begins or what causes it. I know some variables seem to be…

- An installation of Retrospect backup software (specifically the version for use with the Odyssey (http://www.imation.com/products/odyssey/index.html Removeable Hard Disk system)
- The MozyPRO client

I do believe the issue started after an unsuccessful install of the Odyssey product and somehow corrupted VSS. I want to do further testing to see if it was caused by Retrospect itself or some goofy driver issue. The problem definitely seemed to start once we attempted install of the Odyssey product.

Anyone else using an Odyssey hard disk product, install the software and wound up with a corrupt VSS service? I’ll keep this post updated as I discover more info. about this issue.

Haven’t had time to blog about it but we had another Roundtable meeting on Feb. 8th at Calvary Church. I think it went very well. We had 7 people in attendance; representing a bunch of different churches. Our discussions focused around storage/SANs (we currently were the only church looking at a SAN solution), wireless, backups/DR, Exchange 2007 and more. Overall it seems that every church in our area, big or small, is facing the same situations…..just on different scales/sizes and with different budgets to attack those situations with! Made some very strong relationships with Calvary which is just up the road from us; got some very good ideas from them! Overall I thought it was a good meeting and look forward to the next. Thinking sometime later this year (read after Summer)…would like to generate more involvement from other churches around Michigan, not just western MI. If you know anyone who would be interested, let me know.

Also took the time to properly categorize my posts up to this point, did some site redesign and added a pic from Grand Haven from last year…can’t wait for Winter to be over! Nothing is better than camping on the beach at Grand Haven all summer, NOTHING! Well, except perhaps new technology toys

Also finally setup a twitter account that I will be updating daily.

Among my roles at NCC I am also heavily involved in our Arts Department in the creative media area. One of our large issues has been proper communication and scheduling of people, specifically as it pertains to Sunday mornings. After searching the web and even contemplating coding my own homebrew solution I came across Planning Center Online. We actually signed up for the basic plan back in late 2007 and just kind of sat on the project. Eventually I found the volunteer who could take this on and really get it setup properly. We have now just completed our first month or so of “official” use. So far we are scheduling around 60 people consisting of our 3 bands and multiple praise teams as well as our tech. people. People absolutely love it! It has also prompted us to really get serious in planning ahead, we are currently about 1.5-2 months out with our music/series. Hopefully in the next month or so we will be adding our choir to the system, which will add nother 60-70 people, brining our total scheduled people to well over 100+ people. Its working so well our Children’s Ministry department wants to tweak the concept and begin using planning center to distribute PDFs of lessons plans and even volunteer scheduling! This system is working so well we just upgraded to the higher package; we already used up the initial 1GB of data storage.

SO with that said….if you need a central place to plan…..definitely check them out!

At a later date I will post some more details of how we are using Planning Center; but just know it rocks!