Back from GCC

This past Friday I had the opportunity to spend the day with Jason Powell and Ed Buford from Granger Community Church.    GCC is about a 5-hour drive from my place and I dig road trips, so I decided to make a one-day gig out of it.

I rolled into the parking lot around 9:30 and met up with Ed and Jason soon after.  We spend the day covering a miriad of different topics, from SANs to backup strategy to VLAN-ing, and a bunch of other things in-between.  I came home that night feeling absolutely exhausted but very inspired and extremely excited about what I do (not that I don’t usually enjoy what I do, but I feel especially pumped).

I can safely say that this was no-doubt the best learning experience I’ve had in the IT field to date, and it was also a great example of what can happen when you get out of the solo gig and start networking yourself with other people who do what you do.  Monster props to Ed and Jason for taking time and allowing me to hang with them for a day.

Headed West

Tomorrow I’m going to have the privilege of going to Granger Community Church to spend the day with Jason Powell and Ed Buford.  I am PUMPED, man! 

I stumbled onto Jason’s and Ed’s blogs sometime in spring 2006, and then met both Jason and Ed at the 2006 Church IT Roundtable.  The Roundtable was a HUGE eye-opener for me, and I have learned an amazing amount of stuff just from that experience. 

So naturally I’m really looking forward to this trip.  We don’t have an extensive list of pre-planned discussions, but any time you put 2 or more IT geeks in the same room, discussion will always ensue (it’s true!).  I’m taking my laptop and plenty of paper so I can capture whatever we talk about.  This trip will definitely be beneficial.

RAID woes

Last week I came into the office to find that a drive on our domain controller had failed.  No big deal, right?  I overnighted 2 drives, and installed them both the next day; one as a replacement for the failed drive, and another as a hot spare.

I was hurried into work this morning by a voicemail from K.  She informed me that noone was able to log into the Exchange server.  I know I had everything running last night before I left, so this really caught me off-guard.

I rush into the office (fortunately I’m only about 5 miles from the church) and sit down to begin diagnosis.  My tests led me once again to the domain controller I had just worked on less than a week ago.  I tried to click on the start menu, and the whole system froze up.  Wow, the same symtoms that I experienced last week.  I winced, hit the reset button on the machine, and sure enough, the RAID controller’s BIOS shows a rebuild in progress.  Once the server was back up and running, I could see in the event log that the failure had taken place at 7:30

I was partially relieved to see that the drive I had just installed wasn’t the culprit, but was another one of the original drives for that array.  Wow…2 drives in under a week’s time.  These were both Maxtor DiamondMax hard drives that had failed on me, and they’ve been in use for less than a year.  The controller is a Promise Technology TX4310, and we’ve had no issues up to this point.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Another weird point is that the rebuild actually started BEFORE the machine locked up.  The hot spare stepped in just like it was supposed to, but the controller shows 5 device timeouts before the system gave up on it.

Hopefully this is a drive issue and not a controller issue.  Nonetheless, the task of getting a second DC up and running just went up in priority by many notches.

Elements Kick-off

This past weekend we kicked off our new message series – Elements.  The tagline of the series is “6 elements that move your faith beyond periodic.”  Naturally, the phrasing calls for a science-like decor on the stage, no?

Here are some pics from the weekend. (Click to enlarge)

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Grant and Vince working on the giant test tubes.  Plexiglass with light gels set behind them.  Add light and stare at for awhile.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yep, that’s a DMC on the grill, as in ”DeLorean Motor Company.”  Where there’s science, there’s Doc Brown, and where there’s Doc Brown, there has to be a DeLorean!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mike (the owner of the DeLorean) finishes up the detail work.  Those cars are PRETTY! (at least I think so)  This is my first time seeing one up close.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dwight’s “podium.”  Very colorful. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Super Volunteer Dave B. works on getting the giant test tubes mounted.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Guissepi the dog guards his master’s car ferociously.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Elements stage from the control room.  I’m diggin’ the colors, man!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Doc Brown makes his entrance on the DeLorean (we actually had Mike drive it in from backstage.)  GREAT SCOTT!

 

 

 

 

 

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The DeLorean is actually a story in itself.  We had been wanting to move forward with this idea for weeks, and we just kept running into one dead end after another.  The creative team was about ready to give up and just send Doc Brown in on an explosion, or at least a lot of smoke.

On Friday night, our control room manager, who is also a teacher at Kent State, was in the building helping the visual arts crew prep the stage.  He got into a conversation with one of the crew about the DeLorean, and said “well hey, I’ve got a student that owns a DeLorean, let me call him.”  Within one hour, we had the DeLorean sitting on our stage.

It’s amazing how God works stuff out sometimes.  I mean yeah, we could’ve gone forward without the car, but it was a good fit and it added a good bit of excitement to the morning.  I mean seriously, how often do you get Doc Brown rolling in on a DeLorean…on the stage of a CHURCH!

But then again, that’s exactly how it should be on a Sunday morning…always exciting, always intriguing (what’s gonna happen today?), and NEVER boring.

Same name, new place

Well, here it is.  Today I moved my blog from its wordpress.com host to BlueHost.com.  The blog itself is still a WordPress blog, which made it pretty nice when it came time to move the data.  I don’t know much about other blogging platforms, but I know I was very pleased to see that WordPress imported everything from my other site except the blogroll.  On the other hand, I was a little bummed that WordPress didn’t import my blogroll.  Ah well, I was going to put it on a separate page anyway.

Will the visual style change immediately?  I don’t know.  I’ve been looking at a LOT of other themes, but I really haven’t landed on one that I like enough to pull me away from the Regulus theme I’m on right now.

I’ve got some neat stuff to post later, but I need to get some sleep for tomorrow.