anchorite.org

My workspace just got featured on Lifehacker’s Coolest Worspace Contest.

Over the past week there are two classic examples of why a good backup process is critical. One is the highly publicized story of the June Issue of Business 2.0 that was inadvertently deleted two weeks before print and the backup had failed. The second is our own story.

Last summer we setup VMware Server to run test images of servers before deploying to production. One such virtual machine was running Koha, an open source application we were evaluating for our school library. We ended up deciding to stick with Koha and put it into production. Things were busy with the start of the school year so we decided to put off moving it to our production environment that has better redundancy and a full backup process. We never did get around to moving Koha.

Two weeks ago we had an extended power outage, everything came back up just fine except for that VMware server – it was throwing an Operating System Not Found error. I thought no big deal, we have the box setup with software RAID, we can just swap the boot drive and it will come back up. Tried to swap, no dice. Next we tried to recover the data, turns out that partition table was corrupt and I couldn’t get any of the tools to extract the data off of the ext3 file system. We now have turned to our last resort, Gillware, data recovery experts recommended by Ed Buford.

The sad part is that we have had to learn this lesson twice, see my earlier post – Hard Drive Recovery and Backup Solutions. Determined not to mess up a third time, we are reevaluating our backup strategy and processes to make sure that this doesn’t happen again. God willing, we will have our new strategy finalized by next Tuesday, including a better monitoring solution.

One of the services that we are trying out as a secondary, off site backup option is MozyPro (see Jon Edmiston’s post). They offer a 10% discount for non profit or educational institutions. Mozy just signed on GE as a customer and released a Mac client. I spoke with Mozy yesterday and they said that their upcoming release will support backups off of a network share as well.

On the Church IT Podcast last week Chris K mentioned that they were talking to 316 Networks and Akamai about streaming solutions. They are saturating a “75MB pipe … over 500 users @ 282Kbps.” I wanted to throw out a few details on other options that we are looking at (We hit about 180 users @ 340 Kbps).

Currently we are using Windows Media Services for live streaming, I’ve written a few posts on our setup:
Tech we Use: Part 2 – Streaming and Recording
Live Windows Media Streaming Mini-Howto
Second Streaming Server

For hosting Windows Media Services we are using a dedicated Windows server at Serverbeach, but there are several providers that specialize in streaming that friends have recommended:
ChurchQuest – Live streaming starting at $8.95 a month, recommended by David Morcos.
Christian Video Channel – These are the guys that Jason is currently using for their undercover live feed.
VitalStream – Karim Guirguis, a buddy of mine over at the American Bankruptcy Institute uses them extensively.

Light Cast Media is currently serving up video on demand (using Flash) and has a simulated live service in beta. A true live service is in the works.

Neokast is a brand new service that is currently in beta. Cringley says that they use “peer-to-peer technology to effectively emulate a multicast experience.” Advantages are high quality, little bandwidth requirements, unlimited users and almost no cost (If you aren’t charging your viewers, the service is free). There are a couple disadvantages though, there is a required client download and they only support Internet Explorer/Windows as of right now (Mac and Linux versions are in the works).

I’ve tried the Neokast client, they offer multiple quality streams, the video at 800k looks really good, and buffering only took a few seconds. They still haven’t enabled beta users to publish “videokasts” yet, I am looking forward to trying it out.

More on Neokast:
Neokast Blog
The $7 TV Network: Neokast brings multicasting to the masses.
Neokast, Emerging from the Shell

Microsoft has been creating quite a stir over the past few days with their announcement of upgrades to their Silverlight product, which will support live video streaming. Once again, this looks like it will require a download, and it doesn’t look like there will be support for Linux users any time soon. I haven’t had a chance to play with the beta yet. I am not sure if there are Silverlight live streaming service providers out there yet.