anchorite.org

We currently do the majority of our hosting in house. Our Internet connecation and server are pretty reliable. We get into trouble when it comes to power, it seems that we are still on an old rural power grid and we suffer from extended power outages quite often. We have enough battery backup to last an hour or so, but the outages can often last up to 4 hours. God willing we will have a generator installed along with a new server room in the next phase of construction but that is three years away. So we are looking for off site hosting options. Ideally we are looking for a somewhat managed solution where they handle security and backups.

We currently have a OrthdoxSermons.org hosted with 1&1 on a shared hosting plan, they seem to be performing ok – although it is pretty slow at times. I also have some personal sites with BlueHost, but I am not impressed with their management interface. Neither manage security or backups.

Researching on the web I found a few other interesting companies in the hosting space:
Media Temple – “Grid” hosting, advocated on TechCrunch
A Small Orange – Reputation for great support
Mosso – Multiple Server Cluster

What caught my eye about Mosso is that they are a venture of Rackspace. Rackspace is well known in the premium hosting arena, I have used them before and their reliability and support is top notch, but also pricey. Mosso provides shared hosting in a clustered server environment for $100 a month and that included managed security (hardware firewalls) and backup services. They give you 80 GB storage and 2,000GB transfer with unlimited websites. It is designed with the reseller in mind but I don’t see any reason it wouldn’t work well for an organization looking for a host.

One disadvantage for Mosso is that they don’t give root or shell access, which could be problematic with some Linux apps. An advantage is that they do have both Linux and Windows hosting on the same account.

While $100 a month may seem like a lot for hosting, adding managed security and backups is a costly option, usually available only on costly dedicated servers. I decided to give them a try. I was able to setup an account quickly and their interface is pretty straightforward, although it is a little slow.

I decided to call in and ask their support a few questions, I got a tech immediately on the phone (around 5pm on New Year’s Eve). I asked how backups are handled since I didn’t see anything about them in the interface. He said that they manage the entire “disaster recovery” process. All servers are replicated across the cluster and snapshots are taken hourly and if there were any problems they would be responsible for restoring the site.

I will be moving a few of our sites to Mosso over the next few weeks to test, it will be interesting to see if everything runs ok on the cluster. Maybe I can figure a way to test the backups too.

Even with managed backups, I think we will still do our own backups, but hopefully they will only have to be used as a last resort.

Travis, Mosso may be something you want to consider as well.

Our 2006 Winter retreat this year was amazing, the topic was about having a personal relationship with Christ as our Heavenly Bridegroom. Our retreats are one of the best opportunities for spiritual growth and are often a great starting point for our young adults to take their spiritual life to the next level. Personally, I had never really pictured the Bible as love letters from our Bridegroom, it helped to paint reading the Bible in a whole new light. My new challenge for myself is to schedule and take more personal retreats where I can get spend significant quality time with Christ.

All four talks are now available for download at OrthodoxSermons.org. Here are the additional resources we used for the retreat:

Talk 1 – “Jesus My Bridegroom”- by Father Bishoy Andrawes
Video – Isn’t She Beautiful (Bride of Christ) by Vineyard Elizabethtown

Talk 2 – “Living as a Bride of Christ” – by Father Bishoy Andrawes
Presentation
Quiet Time
Discussion Group Questions

Talk 3 – “Only for Overcomers” – by Father Anthony Messeh
Presentation
Handout
Quiet Time

Talk 4 – “The Unfaithful Bride” – by George Bishara
Quiet Time

After the last IT Discussion IT Discussion call, we decided to move forward on a hosted anti-spam service for our email. Today, we started a 30 day trial with Katharion. I know that Chris257 (sorry Chris, not sure of your full name) mentioned they were using them on the call and Travis Kensil blogged that they were switching as well.   We are debating between Katharion, SpamStopsHere and Postini. I know that Jason gives rave reviews to Postini, but they are pricier and make smaller shops jump through hoops with a reseller. I emailed SpamStopsHere about non-profit pricing but I have not received a reply. Katharion gives 25% off their normal pricing for non-profits. Network Computing has a review that mentions all three here, but grades only available on SpamStopsHere B and Katharion B- (apparently Postini’s transport heuristics wouldn’t work with their tests).

We decided to go ahead and try Katharion out, I submitted a request online and I was immediately contacted by Tim Kidder, they provided clear documentation to get up and running, and after 30 minutes of copying over email addresses we were good to go. Tim was great at answering any questions and is very easily accessible via phone or email. I’ll provide updates on how it goes as we get deeper into the trial.

Katharion Features:

• Spam and Virus protection
• Per-user settings
• Message Digest and whitelisting
• Message Continuity (server back-up and webmail access)
• LDAP synchronization -we’ll try to sync up with AD later on

Here are defaults we setup for our users:

• Weekly message digest on Mondays
• Aggressiveness set on medium
• Detected spam will be redirected to junk mail quarantine
• Non-existent users will be bounced

I’ll block all other mail servers on port 25 in a couple of days, giving time for the DNS change to fully propagate.

I’ve had a fun past couple of days, first our church operates on the Coptic calendar which is now synchronized with the “old” Julian calendar, so we won’t be celebrating the Feast of the Nativity “Christmas” until January 7th. That being said we did have a big fun family get together on the 25th and I did get to catch up on a lot of reading I wanted to do.

Last week, I remembered a sermon by one of the theological leaders of our church and an old family friend, Fr. Athanasius Farag, priest of St. Antonious and St. Mina Coptic Orthodox Church in East Rutherford, NJ. He was speaking on a Sunday or two before Christmas about the incarnation of the Word. Fr. Athanasius referenced “On the Incarnation,” a treatise of St. Athanasius, the Patriarch of Alexandria in the fourth century (famous for his opposition to Arianism and authoring the Nicene Creed). Fr. Athanasius was saying that we all should read “On the Incarnation” every year, now I haven’t been faithful to that but I did pick it up last weekend and read through it. In his treatise, St. Athanasius explains and defends why Christ had to take flesh to solve the divine dilemma. It is definitely eye opening and answers a lot of questions as to why Christ did what He did.

On a similar note, there are a lot of rich treasures to be found in the works of the ancient church fathers, I will try to highlight them periodically here. C.S. Lewis, in his introduction to “On the Incarnation” encourages a balanced diet between old and contemporary books, stating that in older books we find “a standard of plain, central Christianity which puts the controversies of the moment in their proper perspective.”

Last Friday, Jason Powell hosted Episode 2 of Church IT Discussions (you can download or listen to the discussion online) on TalkShoe. Here are a few notes on what we discussed (please feel free to add or correct).

First, you may need the lastest Java Runtime Environment (JRE) for the Talkshoe Live Client, although their FAQ sates that the JRE is distributed and packaged with the PC Version of the TalkShoe Live Client. The JRE for Macs can be downloaded from the Apple website.

Pre-call highlights:
North Point Community Church has a cool AV mini server room setup
Seem like no one is connected to the discussion via Skype this week.

Participants: (I am sure I missed a lot, comment and I’ll update the list)
Jason Powell – Granger Community Church – Granger, IN
Andrew Mitry – St. Mark Coptic Orthodox Church – Fairfax, VA
Dave Stone – Bethel Church – Richland, WA
Nick – Central Christian Church of the East Valley – Meza, AZ
Trace Pupke – Seacoast Church – Mount Pleasant, SC
Derek Berg – Woodland Baptist Church, Bradenton, FL
William – Calvary Chapel – Newport News, VA
David Russell – National Community Church – Washington, DC
Tony Dye – Perimeter Church, Duluth, GA

cool or new tools / discoveries:
Jason Powell – groupbar
Opera Browser – Restore Session with all tabs, no memory leaks like Firefox
doesn’t work well with F1
On FireFox, Control + Tab gets you between tabs within a browser

nairdo – Wink is a good tool creakting screencasts/tutorials

dtstone – portableapps.com/apps
Side discussion on USB Drive use on site

jkergosi – esword
wbcderek – ebible.com, xpound.org

Spam – TonyDye
tonydye – Barracuda – hardware device
jason powell – Postini.com – hosted service
ryancl – Ciphertrust Ironmail
Tony Dye brings up a good point about aliasing spam in exchange to forward to vendor spam email.
jeffrey – SpamAssassin linux box
chris257 – Katharion $.42 per box 1/4 cost of Postini for non-profits
Jason mentions mxlogic
GCC blocks all traffic on port 25, only allowing Postini servers to connect
NCC also on postini
Perimeter sends ndr on spam
wphelps – spamstopshere

Houston – Spring 2007 Church IT Roundtable

Roundtable Notes

jeffrey – itdiscuss.org – rss feeds

Next episode – 01/05/07 02:00 PM EST

Post call – highlights:
Northpoints Xsan can scale to 40 terabytes

Just came across Wild Apricot, a Canadian company that does website and online administration tools for non-profits (saw them on TechCrunch). Looks like it could be a useful set of tools for a church just starting their online presence and database. Rates are reasonable starting from $12/month to $200/month.

Here is an overview taken from their site:
* Website templates and hosting, including a tool to create and update webpages
* Member database (use it as your overall contacts database); includes group emailing
* Online event registrations (including credit card payments)
* Donations
* Member self-service (online application, member profile updates)
* Secure webpages for member-only access to store research and other premium content

After a successful few months with PhoneGnome, I looked at how much we were paying per month for Verizon (around $30) and the VocalNet service ($14.99) and said that it just wasn’t worth it for the amount we use our home phone. Sherry and I both have cell phones and we have plenty of minutes on our plan. I was considering canceling when a friend of mine referred me to SunRocket. SunRocket is a VoIP only player similar to Vonage and is in the number two spot in the market.

They have a deal where you can pay $199 for the year and get unlimited calling to the US, Canada and Puerto Rico. The disadvantage compared to the PhoneGnome setup I had before is there is no backup and or traditional 911 support (SunRocket does provide Enhanced Emergency 911), but we have our cell phones for that.

I ordered it and they assigned us a temporary number to use until we port our home number. We ported our number on Monday and it is working well. What is cool is that you get to keep the temporary number at no extra cost, so I setup up with distinctive ring and the fax machine picks it up.

If you are interested in signing up, click here to give me credit for the referral.

I’ve gotten several requests lately for recommendations on network storage. We have been using Infrant products at church for over a year, so far we are really happy with the reliability and performance.

We have the ReadyNAS 1000s at church and the ReadyNAS 600 at an off site location. We us them for media storage and backup to disk, it runs on Linux but integrates with Active Directory seamlessly. Macs are also supported via AFP, CIFS and NFS protocols.

My truck turned 100,000 miles today, it is a 2000 Chevrolet Silverado and the first vehicle I bought new. The truck has run reliably for its first 100k and has been a great tool in the service, moving around equipment and pulling around trailers full of donations. With 4WD and a manual transmission, it is fun to drive and relatively fuel efficient (averages 20 mpg). God willing it’ll last at least another hundred thousand miles.

We have been toying with a new video calling service from SightSpeed. We are using it in two different ways, first we are using it to allow Father Anthony to host meetings on college campuses from his home. Second, I have started an online small group with a few guys who are spread out around the country but still want to involved in a small group.

In the first setup, Father Anthony was using a video camera connected to his computer via firewire and a headset. At the University of Maryland – College Park, I setup a computer with a webcam, projector and conferencing microphone. Father Anthony gave a word and answered questions from a group of about 15 students.

I had a hard time getting a good shot with the webcam and the only Internet connection available was wireless (and it wasn’t reliable). Otherwise, once we got going it went pretty well (except for a few seconds of lost communication thanks to the spotty wireless). The video and audio was clear on both sides and the interaction was almost as good as if Father Anthony was there himself.

We are working on putting together a case that would have a video camera, computer, mic, speakers, and a projector all in one that we could send out to universities for video meetings. That would allow us to avoid all the setup issues and an assure good quality audio and video. We also are asking the students to work on reserving rooms with wired ethernet connections.

For my online small group, I asked all the members to go out and get a webcam and headset if they did not already have one. I had them install SightSpeed and test it with me before our meeting. I upgraded my SightSpeed Free plan to the Pro plan for $50 year (include free webcam and headset) so that I can host multi-party conferences (up to 4 people). Group members can use the free SightSpeed plan to connect to the conference.

One of the group members couldn’t get SightSpeed to connect, turned out it was because he had a bad proxy set in Internet Explorer (he used Firefox) and SightSpeed was using those settings.

The conference worked pretty well, video was great, but audio wasn’t perfect (I think it may have been due to one of the members poor quality headset or bad internet connections). To get past the bad audio, I had them all call into our conference bridge and we had a great first meeting.