Recently I have gotten quite a few questions about why we chose to move stmarkdc.org from Joomla! to Drupal. Our main motivators were Drupal’s taxonomy system that allows for tagging with granular access control (allows a ministry to update only their section and nothing else) and polished multi-lingual support. Drupal is a little more complex to get up and running but for sites with a lot of content the flexibility is great.

We are looking forward to moving OrthodoxSermons.org to Drupal in the near future, we have begun talks with a vendor who is an expert in Drupal media sites - more details coming soon.

More reading on Joomla! versus Drupal:
Drupal and Joomla comparison - CMS Report
Joomla and Drupal - Which One is Right for You? - Alledia
Why can’t we be friends? Joomla versus Drupal - Communicopia
Comparing Joomla vs Drupal Content Management Systems - Ye Olde Rad Blog II
Joomla 1.5 & Drupal 6.1 Performance Comparison - CMS Report

By God’s grace, OrthodoxSermons.org is proud to report that it’s library has now exceeded over 1,000 sermons in less than 2 years with many more to come. Thank you to all have contributed sermons and to all who have helped support this website. You are helping spread God’s word to all the ends of the earth!

We have now begun planning for OrthodoxSermons.org 2.0, a complete redesign which hopefully will be easier to use with better search, categorization and many more features.  We would love your feedback on how we can improve the site and what you would like to see in the next version.  Please leave a comment with your thoughts.

Testing out Neokast to push a 887 kbps live video stream (640×480 24 fps). Seems to be working pretty well, only downsides are that it is Windows only and requires a plugin. We had around 25 users on it earlier today with no major hiccups.

You can check it out during any one of our Holy Pascha services this week.

Further reading: Bob Cringley - The $7 TV Network: Neokast brings multicasting to the masses.

Most of our infrastructure is running on ancient Dell 6450 servers with quad PIII 550 processors. We have been looking forward to making the jump to a virtualized environment and the pieces necessary to make that happen have just arrived.

Yesterday, we managed the new servers outfitted with the additional hard drives, memory and processors and then load them into the cabinet. We will use the top two servers to run VMware Server on top of CentOS and the bottom will be our “SAN” running iSCSI Enterprise Target on CentOS.

Specifications:
VMware Servers (both boxes are identical)
HP ML370G5
2 Dual-Core Xeon 2.66 Processors
10GB ECC DDR II SDRAM
HP Smart Array P400/512 Controller
2 72GB 10K SAS

SAN
HP ML370G5
2 Dual-Core Xeon 2.66 Processors
4GB ECC DDR II SDRAM
2 HP Smart Array P400/512 Controller
16 72GB 10K SAS
SATA RAID Controller
2 750GB SATA

We had purchased a 3ware SATA RAID controller for use on the SAN box but it looks like there are memory allocation errors at the BIOS level that neither HP or 3ware have done anything to resolve so we are researching another option.

For the next few days we will just work at getting the cabling tweaked and the hardware tested and verifying driver support in CentOS.

The server room overhaul is just about wrapped up and the network documentation and diagrams are coming together nicely.  The Fluke LINKRUNNER recommended by Chris-scbc on the #citrt was a big help with sorting out all those cables.

Got a couple of updated sonogram pics of the baby.

Headed out to Oklahoma City for MinistryTECH/CITRT tomorrow, still working on the materials for my Asterisk breakout session.

The second phase of the server room overhaul is coming along nicely, we got all the switches, patch panels and Neat-Patch installed on the telecom rack. We are almost done running 24 cables to move a switch/patch panel from our senior priest’s office to the server room (that required drilling holes through two concrete block walls). Next step is to reassign some of the ports to different vlans and cleaning up the wiring.

Once again, mega props to volunteers Miranda, Samer and Tina for all their hard work.

We got Verizon Fios fiber Internet installed at the house today, it took the technician about 4 hours to complete the install but he did do a nice, clean job. Overall I was pretty impressed with how smoothly it went, the technician arrived half an hour early and was very courteous. The only snag was that I didn’t have an analog line for the tech to dial out on and activate the service (you would think they would give them an EVDO card), so the tech had to call customer service and wait for them to do it. We are up and running, I think the speed test says it all…

Download Speed: 15497 kbps (1937.1 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 14344 kbps (1793 KB/sec transfer rate)

We started on our server room overhaul last night with moving our old server cabinet to the basement computer lab and putting a new server cabinet in the server room. Today we will run additional wiring, cleaning up the wiring rack and install a shelf for the security camera servers.

Props to the volunteer team that got everything moved and back up amazingly fast last night.

Photos on Flickr.

I gave GooSync a whirl with one of our school teachers who has a Palm Treo 680, calendar sync to Google seems to work pretty well, but the contacts sync only connects to GooSync, not Google. To get your contacts in/out of Google you have to import/export CSV files. Hopefully we will get a better solution soon now that Google has released their Contacts Data API.

Steve Jobs announced today that the iPhone will have full ActiveSync support allowing it work with Microsoft Exchange. ActiveSync as well as the feature packed SDK also announced today will be available as a free update in June. Full coverage at Engadget.

Yesterday, Google released Calendar Sync which “allows you to sync events between Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook Calendar. You’ll be able to determine the direction of information flow, as well as the sync frequency.”

Today, Google released its Contacts Data API which “allows client applications to view and update Contacts content in the form of Google Data API feeds.”

Additional Coverage:
GigaOM - iPhone Ready to Rumble With Blackberry
David Szpunar - Apple’s iPhone Getting Exchange ActiveSync! And Google does Outlook Sync, too.
Google Code - 3. 2. 1. Contact. The API has landed
Google Enterprise - Introducing Google Calendar Sync