Daryl Hunter - Church IT Guy

Green Day 2010 & Bones

Yesterday was St. Patrick's Day.  Did you wear green?  We all did.  Jenny had a fun idea and we had a St. Patrick's Day Family Party.  It was really cool.

 

We had Green everywhere on the the table for dinner.  Tablecloth. Placemats.  Plates, forks, and spoons.  Using food coloring, we had green milk, green applesauce, and even green macaroni & cheese!

If you look closely at our "center pieces" I think we had every green toy imaginable from our house gracing the table.  How fun!

 

Andrew wore green stripes.  I don't know how that Cheerio escaped him - I'm sure it got eaten shortly after this picture was taken.

Anyway, after dinner we watched part of a Veggie Tales movie - the one that has a fun story about St. Patrick.  Did you know he was kidnapped by pirates and sold into slavery in Ireland?  He fed pigs for 6 years, then escaped, ended up back home, got his church / theological training, and ended up going back to Ireland to teach the entire country about God's love - back to the same place where he was a slave years before.  I never knew the story, sadly, until I watched he video a few years ago.  It's amazing how a fun little kids video can teach you about things.

Anyway, after our video we took a hike.  We live near a park, so all five of us went and wandered through the woods.  During our hike, we found this...

 

We don't know what it is.  We asked around and got lots of different thoughts including cat, raccoon, chipmunk & even mutant dinosaur skull.

What do you think this is?  What did YOU do on St. Patrick's day?

Work / Life Update

It's been a little while, and sometimes it's nice to not talk ONLY about technical mumbo jumbo.  So, here's a quick update on what's going on in my life...

Let's start with the important stuff

My Kids
Nathan is my oldest and he's almost 5.  I can't believe it.  He's becoming a really funny little man.  He's picked up some bad habits from his old man and is relatively addicted to "screen things" - like computers, Wii, mobile phones (for the games), etc.  He's an asynchronous learner, and is crazy bright with things like Math and reading and "reasoning" concepts.  He's not as bright with other things (like coloring, cutting with scissors, etc.) but - hey - he's not 5!  :)  He starts Kindergarten this fall.  Wow.  He ALMOST beat me at backgammon the other night.  Almost.

Jacob is our middle boy and he's almost 3 1/2.  He's is really stretching his boundaries (and our patience) recently.  His strengths right now are very spatial / mechanical / imaginative oriented.  He loves to build with lego/duplo and play with Playdoh.  I've started taking him on the trips to Lowes to build stuff.  This last week he had "dry fit" all the parts in like 4 seconds and was ready to go.  Nathan and I were still reading directions :)

Andrew is our youngest.  He's 10 months old and into EVERYTHING.  I seriously think we need to contract him out as a "babyproof inspector."  He became mobile much earlier than our older boys, so we weren't quite ready for his level of.. um.. curiosity :)  He's about ready to walk.  He'll walk along with a walker, or if you hold his hands.  He likes to stand in the middle of the room, bend down, pick stuff up, and then stand back up.  For some reason he like to pick things up and bash himself in the forehead with them too.  He must get that from his momma.

My Better Half
Speaking of... Jenny and I have been married for almost 9 years now.  Crazy.  It was about this time 10 years ago that we were on a Mission Trip to Eastern Kentucky and I'm pretty sure she couldn't stand me.  No really.  I could barely stand myself.  I hope we can get away for some "just us" trips later this summer.  It's difficult right now with Andrew being so young, and school for Nathan, etc., but we'll see.

My 3 Words
If you remember, which you probably don't, but if you DO - I have a goal to read 40 leadership/inspirational books this year.  It's a lofty goal.  The month of February really jacked my schedule, but I'm pressing forward.  Here's where I'm at so far:

• The Servant by James Hunter
• Speed of Trust by Stephen Covey (currently in the middle of a leadership / bookstudy on this)
• First Break all the Rules by Marcus Buckingham
• Good to Great by Jim Collins (an annual read for me)
• Tribes by Seth Godin (a re-read)
• Choosing to Cheat by Andy Stanley
• Confessions of a Pastor by Craig Groeschel
• Next Generation Leader by Andy Stanley (currently reading)
• Outliers by Malcom Gladwell (next on the list)

As for "play" and "share" - I'm getting better at both.  I'm giving more of my time away to other Churches doing service / technical projects.  I'm also spending some more time with the boys and looking forward to warmer weather so we can actually get out of the house!  We're looking forward to doing more geocaching - a new hobby we're wanting to develop.

Work Stuff

Now I guess we'll dive into work...So, it looks like things are "stuck" on a few projects right now... here's where they stand...

Exchange 2010
If you've read through our "install" or "skunkworks" posts, you know that Exchange 2010 is a hot topic for us.  But you'll also know that we're "stuck" because of Cisco Unity not having Exchange 2010 support yet.

Wireless
We've got dozens and dozens and dozens of independant, IOS-based Cisco wireless access points - spread about 14 locations in 5 states.  We still use WEP and everyone and their uncle knows our "hidden" SSID and WEP key.  That's annoying.  We're looking to move toward something else, but we're also looking to gather somesort of centralized console into wireless at our primary location(s).  So, we have an active proposal in for some Ruckus gear.  We should know this week whether that gets approved.

Disaster Recovery
We're still dealing with the fallout from our dropped (cry / tear / whine) rack full of DR gear.  After chasing ghosts and working up and down the foodchain with our hardware/software vendors, we're wandering through the "insurance claim" process.  They are great to work with, and I just got the last of the technical detail to them last week.  We hope to get this buttoned up soon.  Tied to DR is also our XSAN Storage challenge - we're "almost full" again with our XSAN storage and have a project in the works on that.  We hope to know more later this week whether we can get some funding approved for that project soon.

Microsoft Dynamics SL
One of my guys, @mburleson, is leading our project to upgrade to the latest version of Dynamics.  He's doing very well.  This is the second "large" upgrade of this product he's led through since joining the team in 2008.  I'm sure he'll be ready to put some large focus elsewhere :)  If all goes as expected, we'll be done with this no later than 5/1 - 6 more weeks!  We'd love to see it done sooner of course.

I guess that's the really big stuff...

What about you?  What's going on in your life?

January 2010 Update (Time flies)

Here's a summary of the last few weeks:

• ice
• snow
• rain
• ice
• snow
• rain

Do you see a pattern?

From January 4 - 25, I participated in a 21-day "Daniel Fast" along with the large majority of the staff at my Church - lifechurch.tv.  This was a time of "resetting / rebooting" for many of our staff.  We have the privilege of serving a world-wide community of people who have either already stepped over the line of faith, and of course those that think we're totally weird.  For me, personally, the Daniel Fast was a time of reflection on 2009 and anticipation of 2010 - includng my three words.

For those of you that like to keep me accountable on my "read" word for 2010, my reading list for January 2010 has been:

• The Servant by James Hunter - finished and currently in a staff bookstudy
• Speed of Trust by Stephen Covey (still have about 100 pages to go)
• First Break all the Rules by Marcus Buckingham - finished
• Good to Great by Jim Collins (an annual read for me) - finished

About 10 days ago, I flew to our home office in Oklahoma with Greg Kamer with The Mirazon Group.  They, Mirazon, are our partner of choice when working on deep Microsoft, Virtualization and Storage technologies.  I've personally engaged with them for some very large "forklift" migrations, a lot of brain share, and even a few smaller licensing opportunities.

For this project, Greg & I worked with one of "my guys" - Mark Burleson - to build a MIcrosoft Search Server environment.  We have a large file server, and initially are indexing just over 1TB of data.  Soon, maybe if I can be convinced, we'll index our "users share" also - adding another couple TB of data to the mix.  The project has been great, and we had a great chance to provide a "search" tool for both our PC and Mac user groups. I look forward to rolling this out to our staff very soon.

While working on Search, we spent a lot of time talking about Sharepoint and what all that can offer to us as a staff.  We also spent a lot of time discussing a large Wireless project - and have been totally blown away by technologies from Ruckus Wireless. I'm sure you've noticed I'm a HUGE Cisco Evangelist.  I've been using Cisco products for well over a decade - closer to 15 years - and am fairly biased towards them.  I'm a "right tool for the job" kinda guy, but really believe in Cisco.  For this particular project, I've been pleasantly surprised and excited about the Ruckus gear.  I'm looking forward to learning more.

Oklahoma was fun, but we also got stuck for a few days.  Our flights out of Oklahoma were canceled Thursday, Friday and Saturday (we left Sunday) because of a giant ice / snow storm that effectively shut down the Oklahoma City region.  The bad news is that we really missed our family.  The good news is that we had a chance to work on some other random projects like:

• Provisioning a Cisco 6503-E, and aggregating it to our core Cisco 6509, and prepping it for our soon-to-come Wireless project.
• Stubbing out our newest Campus - launching sometime in March/April.  We built the routed and switched network, provisioned the Active Directory Site and Domain Controller, added wireless, and tested all that goodness.  So, that's fun.
• Provisioned a backup/secondary SIP router - we have migrated from PRI to SIP for our primary DID block(s) and will be moving toward full-SIP everywhere it makes sense.  Our Primary SIP Router is a Cisco 3725 and our backup SIP Router is a Cisco 2811.
• Provisioned a backup / DR-based Cisco VG248 Voice Gateway at our DR site.  Over the last year, we've worked hard to remove SPOF - single points of failure.  You can read more about that project here. This VG248 will provide emergency based "walmart phones" in a true disaster situation.  It also will help provide analog lines for random projects we do - kind like the Dave Ramsey Town Hall project last Spring.
• Provisioned a new physical Server 2008 R2 DC for our Central Campus.
• Provisioned two new virtual Server 2008 R2 DCs - one for Central and one for our DR site.
• Provisioned our 2x virtual Exchange 2010 Enterprise boxes - just installed the OS and joined the domain.  That project will be coming very soon.  One box will be at Central and one at the DR site and we will be using HA technologies for database redundancy, failover, etc.

Anyway that's a lot of stuff.  And I'm still sleepy.

This next quarter (1Q2010) will be CRAZY exciting.  Never boring for sure.

What's been going on in your world?