Is that a small server room on your wall?

I just came across this tonight.  I wish this product would have been available when we were in our previous building!

Here’s a link to the manufacturer’s product page.

Work night

Last night was another work night at NewPointe.  Here’s what went down.

–> Data/phone lines were run to the kitchen.  This is funny, because I remember doing the wiring plan thinking When will we ever need phones and data in there?  Well here we are, 6 months into the building and they’re being installed.  It just goes to show you, never say “never” and don’t lay down too many absolutes when planning a network.

–> A 12-drive eSATA array made its way to our Final Cut desk.  Since mid-March, we’ve been making it a point to archive video from our services from the weekend…at least one of them.  The problem comes with the fact that our video system is HD (it looks great, but it’s a double-edged sword).  Recording HD video will stretch your hard drives to the limit.  Compressed HD runs about 60 or so GB per hour (which is great compared to uncompressed HD, which is upwards of about 650GB per hour).

Enter the Norco DS-1220.  It’s got some pretty good reviews on it and so far I’ve really liked what I’ve seen.  We loaded ours up with 12 750GB drives; 10 for the array and 2 for hot spares.  The only drawback I’ve seen with this board is that it comes with a PCI-X eSATA controller, and since our MacPros don’t have PCI-X on them, I ended up buying a HighPoint RR2314 eSATA controller to work with our Mac’s PCI-express.  Other than that, I’m pretty happy with it thus far.

Next Work Night:  It’s gonna be a cable-pulling extravaganza.  We’re putting some much-needed data and phone drops into the control and editing rooms, and also taking care of some AV lines in the process.

Is it just me?

I rarely use my browser to look at my own blog while I’m at work, mainly because I use Windows Live Writer.

I did see it today though…

 This is definitely not how the theme is supposed to look, so if you’re seeing this please give me a shout, ok?

Copyright (and how it affects you)

I’ve recently started listening to the Creative Synergy Podcast, hosted by Greg Atkinson and Anthony Coppedge.  In their latest episode (Ep. 5 when this was posted), they talk about copyright laws and how they affect churches.  VERY interesting stuff to me, mainly because I’m working in video and media as well as IT.  Any church that is working with video, purchased audio, or streaming should give this a listen.

You can get to the podcast notes and the download link by going here.

Imaging

I rarely (and I mean RARELY) come in on Fridays, but I decided to come in this Friday because there were some PCs that needed prepped for our interns by Tuesday.

We have a base package of software that gets installed on our PCs by default, and until now, it’s been somewhat of a pain, especially when I have to prep a PC that I don’t have an image built already for.

I don’t know what led me to do this, and I don’t know why I never thought of it sooner, but I found that if you run an installer from the command line and add a “/?” switch, there’s a real good chance you’ll see an option to run the installer in silent mode — basically this means no user interaction … SWEET!  Take that option, throw in some scripting, and you’ve got a VERY hassle-free way to install a good bit of software.  There are some rogue installers out there that don’t give you a silent install option, and so those are in a separate folder.  Once those are done, the script kicks in, installs the rest of the software, and also copies all the sysprep tools onto the new machine so that we can reseal it and get it ready for imaging.

There’s quite a few imaging tools out there.  I decided to use SystemRescueCD for what we’re doing.  SysRescCD is basically a live Gentoo Linux image that contains a nice array of tools for disk troubleshooting, partition resizing, and backup.  I simply boot the CD, make a samba connection to my imaging share, and run a script that packages the MBR, the partition table, and all of the partitions up, compresses them, and uploads them to the share.  A separate script will download the image you select, and apply it to any blank harddrive. 

If you’ve got a decent knowledge of Linux (my Linux skills are nothing to brag on), download the ISO and give SysRescCD a try.  If you want the upload and download scripts to make life easy, give me a shout and I’ll pass them along.