Where's all of the traffic?

I was doing my weekly breeze through of my google analytics and when I came across the blog listing I noticed it had completely flatlined which reminded me that I hadn't posted anything in a while. The truth is, we've been busy. Mostly because we are looking for a network administrator to manage our IT infrastructure, we are replacing the brains in our PBX Thursday, and I'm getting ready to go to camp with the 5th and 6th graders from the church. Sad to say but the blog has been a little neglected and I apologize for that. So, please accept my apology.

Farewell to a Great Table Waiter

A couple of months ago Wayne Bollenbacher (my immediate supervisor) announced that he was was being called to a different job at a different organization. He spent 12 years at Crossings Community Church leading the church by serving. He always had wise, kind, and encouraging words to say but what impacted me the most was the spirit with which he served. Numerous times in the announcement of Wayne leaving I'd hear him say "I'd be most happy if my epitaph read: 'he was a great table waiter.'" His humility and character really reflected what a great table waiter is. Most people think that the role of a table waiter is second class and something to be looked down on. Wayne blew those perceptions out of the water for me and established the table waiter as an honorable job that's a very important part of ministry. Whatever needed to be done he would do it. He wore many different hats here which included treasurer, human relations, operations manager, finance, and the man with all of the answers. I witnessed him walk down the halls time after time and although no one could see and he wasn't a janitor, he'd pick up trash or wipe up the floors. In my absence he would act as tier 1 tech support. The list could go on and on of how he would see some kind of support service that needed to be done and he would do it.

Wayne lead by example with Love and great effort and effort for the Kingdom. He taught me to be proud of the support staff position and for that I couldn't thank him enough. This goes without saying, Wayne will be greatly missed.

UPS's don't like small generators

In our effort to keep our datacenter running we rented a relatively small generator to run our IT services during our multi-day power outage. We found out the hard way that small generators and our battery backups don't work well together. The electricians were explaining to us how the power is sometimes too dirty for a UPS to function. The units would switch contently between line power and the battery. Unfortunately  the batteries weren't off long enough to charge and they were eventually drained. Now we are on a quest to find out how to run our datacenter on emergency power. We don't actually pull that much juice but we don't want to run on dirty power. If you have some experience with small generators and computer equipment, I'd love to get your take (read: solution) on this problem.

Extended Power Outage

Over the next couple of days we will experience an extended power outage in our administrative office area which includes our Datacenter. This is due to constructions and the need to move some of the lines that power this part of the building. We are doing quite a bit to prepare for the outage. A large generator will be tied into our current infrastructure to power the entire wing during working hours. This wouldn't have been a problem until we realized that the servers and phones work even after hours. To accommodate this we will be running our phone system, network equipment, and 5 servers off a smaller generator that will run until the power is back on.

The cool part about this (other than the gas powered noise) is we will be able to simulate a large power outage disaster. This has instigated the installation of a power outlet in our datacenter which will connect to a generator if a true, unexpected disaster actually happens.