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Well, we have been running on Verizon/PhoneGnome for about a month now and I am pretty happy with it, overall sound quality has been great and everything is working well. It looks like Verizon charges will total to about $25 a month (they have hefty fees and charges) and VocalNet $15 a month, which works out to about $12 more than what I was paying for Vonage.

When I got my bill from Verizon, I found a line connection and order processing charges for over $40. When I had ordered the service the representative specifically said that because I was a returning customer (porting from Vonage), there would be no installation or connection charges. I called Verizon, they apologized for the mistake but said there was nothing they could do about it and I would have to pay the charges, I asked for a supervisor and was told the same thing. I think that if a representative of a company states something and the company agrees that a mistake is made they should do their best to resolve it. I decided to quickly file a complaint online apprising the SCC, FCC and BBB of what had happened (thank God for online forms and copy/paste).

I have to give credit to the SCC (Virginia State Corporation Commission), they emailed a personal response to me 15 minutes later and assigned my case to an investigator. A couple of days later I got a voicemail from a Verizon representative apologizing for what had happened and asking me to call back and discuss a resolution. When I called she offered to credit all the install charges. I am very impressed with the quick turnaround and resolution.

The BBB replied a week later saying they can’t help and the FCC never replied, looks like the SCC is the way to go when it comes to resolving complaint with the local utilities.

We are going to stick to this combination of service for now, it seems to be working well and give us the redundancy we need.

Yesterday, Father Anthony as part of his American Idol series was speaking about the idol of comfort, one of the points that struck me was why we should deny ourselves. The reason he gave is that the reward outweighs the cost, citing examples of how Christ, St. Paul, Mother Teresa and others willingly suffered because they looked towards the reward (Hebrews 11:25-26). He also quoted King David, “Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere; I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of the wicked.” Psalm 84:10.

Today, I was reading Revelation 21:1-5, where St. John describes our reward, a place with no more death, sorrow, crying or pain. He quotes God as saying that He shall make all things new. Many times I lose focus and get caught up in the fray of life, this served as an important reminder for me to keep my eyes on the prize (1 Corinthians 9:24).

This morning’s quiet time was Matthew 20:1-16, the parable about the laborers all paid equally. I enjoyed it so much that I decided to try the chapter summary method for bible study this week.

The chapter summary involves reading it at least five times, asking questions and summarizing the central themes.

Chapter Summary Form from Rick Warren’s Bible Study Methods:

Over the past few months my Windows XP desktop was beginning to crawl, I knew that it was getting close to the time when it would need a clean wipe and maybe some hardware upgrades. I decided to invest in an extra gigabyte of RAM and one of the fastest hard drives on the market, the Western Digital Raptor. The Raptor I chose is a 150 GB, 10K RPM, 1.5 Gb/s hard drive with 16 MB cache. Total cost was about $350.

When the new memory and hard drive arrived I decided to go with installing Linux on my desktop instead of Windows XP. I had tried running Linux as my primary operating system on two different occasion but I always ended using XP again. The first time it was because there was no good Microsoft Outlook equivalent (Evolution was still flaky) and the second time was because we were doing a lot of work in MediaShout and there was no way to get that working in Linux. We still use MediaShout, but I am no longer heavily involved with building scripts so I can get away with not having it on my machine.

Our pilot test this summer running open source applications for the summer camp technology curriculum was successful and we are ditching Microsoft Office on the desktop (except Outlook) and running OpenOffice instead for all teachers and students. We will be saving quite a bit by not having to get all those extra Microsoft Office licenses. If it goes well this year we may even consider going Linux on the desktop as well.

With that in mind, I figured that it would make sense for to test how a Linux Desktop would integrate into our environment. I had read a lot about Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) 10 and how well integrates with Active Directory so I decided to download the evaluation and give it a try. I kept getting errors trying to install, it couldn’t find the software catalog. After some time searching on Google and giving various boot options a try, I decided to see if Ubuntu would install easier (I had seen David’s post on the latest release).

Ubuntu Dapper Drake installed smoothly and in about 20 minutes I had my basic system up and running. The installation didn’t automatically detect my second monitor and I ended up having to copy someone’s X configuration off the web to get the extended desktop working properly. Next I ran Automatix which automates the installation of a lot of commonly used applications.

I was impressed, there has been definite improvement over the years on the Linux desktop, everything seem to work with far less bugs and interfaces are more refined.

Now I needed to see about joining our Active Directory Domain. Following the ActiveDirectoryWinbindHowto, I joined my desktop to our domain. It wasn’t too painful but it definitely was not as seamless as the SLED 10 reviews make it seam with its graphical interface. Now I could login to the Ubuntu desktop with my (or any) domain account.

I did login with my domain account and find that the audio stopped working, turns out that when logging in with a domain account, Ubuntu does not automatically add the user to all the necessary local groups. I ended up adding myself to the following groups (the default groups on a non domain account):

Now everything was working properly for the domain account and looking positive, I setup Evolution to connect to our Exchange server and it is working pretty well. I was able to connect to all my file shares without a problem and OpenOffice is working great. I was able to import all my Firefox bookmarks and extensions just by dragging them into my profile. For some reason Sage, my RSS reader extension in Firefox didn’t pick up the feeds when everything was copied over, so I just exported the OPML file from Sage on Windows Firefox and imported it back to Sage on Linux Firefox.

I do quite a bit of web work so I was curious to see how difficult it would be to install Internet Explorer on Ubuntu. I knew it could be done with Wine, but last time I had checked it was quite complex. Turns out that their is a slick script, IEs4Linux that handles the installation (provided Wine is already installed, I had installed it with Automatix). I downloaded the script and ran it, a few seconds later I had Internet Explorer up and running.

I have had the system up and running for two days now and I am very happy with it, it is stable, functional and blazing fast. I have noticed a couple sites that won’t run well because of the older version of Flash, hopefully Adobe will release a new version soon.

I think we still have a long way to go before we are ready to deploy Linux on the desktop at St. Mark’s, but this is definitely a good start.

These past two weeks I haven’t been able to write much because we have been swamped preparing for the new school year. By the grace of God Little Flock Christian School has blossomed, changing this year from a program that offered K-3/K-4/Kindergarten with a student population of less than 50 to a program that offers K-3 through sixth grade with a student population of more than 140. Of course that also means a boost in staff, so we have 23 school employees starting this Wednesday. most of them are new to LFCS.

Quick overview on what we are doing to prepare for the new school year:

• Prepare new Ghost images for teacher/student/lab computers.
• Setup new (donated) Win2k3 file server for staff/teacher/student shares.
• Configure group policies to lockdown computers and accounts.
• Installing and configuring Focus/SIS, an open source student information system.
• Installing and configuring Koha, an open source integrated library system.
• Updating documentation and polices for the new school staff.
• Adding 22 phones and 2 VoIP Speakers to use for paging and in school communication.
• Using DansGuardian for content filtering and SpamAssassin for spam/virus filtering.
• Getting OTRS, a trouble ticket system, up and running to manage the expected increase in requests.

God has been teaching me that we really have to rely on Him and not on ourselves. Many times this past week I have gotten frustrated that I couldn’t get something to work or that we were behind schedule, I would then remember that it is up to Him to complete His work and not us, I would pray that if it His will – He would get it done and every time God would answer faithfully. God definitely likes us humble, not depending on our talents or skills to accomplish His work, but rather depending on Him, we always have to remember to ask for God’s help throughout the day.

A few days ago the floppy drive on my Windows XP desktop started buzzing periodically, I thought it was just me and maybe I had contracted a virus. I checked my Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition and it hadn’t picked up anything so I installed AVG, still nothing. I thought maybe spyware, ran Spybot and ewido, nothing suspicious. I started to get reports of floppy drives going off all around the network, uh oh! I tried to think back and see what changes we had made that would affect the entire network. One of our volunteers, David, had done some tweaking in group policy on our domain policy, maybe something went awry. I emailed and he came in to check last night. We looked through the domain policy and discovered that it wasn’t even enabled right now so it couldn’t be the problem. Dave timed the interval and found that it goes off every 5 minutes, that number rung a bell, I had just been toying with the configuration files in OpenNMS and the default polling interval is 5 minutes. We logged in and temporarily turned off OpenNMS and the floppy drives stopped buzzing! Thank God it wasn’t a virus or spyware! We all had a good laugh and found that the SNMP polling was checking up on the floppy. Now that we know the cause, we can figure out the best way to deal with it.