What’s your church’s backup plan?

Please tell me you have one?

There are numerous options and I won’t bore you with them – but one of the newer ideas around is cloud based backup. As in you copy your data to a remote data centre and let them worry about servers, resilience, cooling and all the other headaches that come with running a data centre.

However, who says you have to trust an unknown third party with your data?

So, if you’re happy that your backup plan actually works then why not find another local(ish) church and do a deal to put a server in their data room and let them do the same in yours. Then setup your server / software to copy the data offsite and voila you have a secure, offsite backup server.

• Is this something you’d do?
• Or is my idea too radical?
• What’s your cheap, offsite & secure solution?

Today’s post is a guest post from Kevin Weatherby. Kevin is a cowboy by trade and a pastor by calling and has some fantastic stories and insights and a wonderful ability to link stories from ‘the ranch‘ to real life spiritual applications.

Here’s one that caught my eye recently and Kevin kindly agreed to re-write it to better suit my tech blog. Thanks Kevin.

My friend Stuart asked me to pass along a few high tech cowboy tips and pointers post. I am always willing to help people out where and when I can. Today’s lesson will be on computer repair. There is a right way and a wrong way to get things done….I’ll leave you to decide which one this might be.

When you live 30 miles from the nearest anywhere, you learn to use a variety of things in a variety of situations. Cowboys can figure out how to fix items, or at least patch them, with the simplest things he has laying around.

I had lightning strike the house about 5 years ago and ruined my computer. I know I should have had a surge protector, but it was outside running the air compressor, the drill, two heat lamps, a fountain pump, a weedeater, a radio, a kick-butt chair massager, a battery charger, two ceiling fans, a burned up coffee maker, a curlin’ iron, and a cell phone charger.

Well, this computer wasn’t working, so I didn’t figure I would break it by trying to fix it. It was already fried. I opened it up to see if anything was wrong. The whole durn thing looked like a rainbow bright rat’s nest with all the colorful wires and green boards. I didn’t know the first thing about what any of that stuff did or where to begin. The whole thing looked broken to me. I couldn’t even find the cards from the Solitaire Game that I played so much. But I did find one of the mines from minesweeper. It looked remarkably like a mouse turd.

I figured I would just start where the cord went in the back. I had to take out about fourteen screws the size of a pencil lead just to get into the little box where the cord goes. I didn’t have a screwdriver that small so I just took a hacksaw and opened it like everyone else does. That is how ya’ll would do it, right?

Anyway, the first thing I saw in this little box was a fuse. It was not a big fuse, but it didn’t take an electrical jeanius to see that the durned thing was blown. I had never seen a fuse like this in my whole life. I didn’t know where I was going to find a “little weird computer fuse” store. So I did the next best thing. I made one out of baling wire.

All a fuse does is make electricity go from one side of it to another. Wire will do that. I went out to the horse pens and got some wire that was tied up there. I didn’t use the good stuff, I used the real rusty batch. It didn’t have to be pretty. It just had to run a little electricity. I taped that little piece of baling wire on the outside of that fuse and secured it with a little piece of duct tape. It’s very hard to get a piece of duct tape that small. I was afraid at one point I was going to have to get some bubble gum to make the wire stay put.

In the end though, the toughest part was getting the blasted thing back together, not fixing it. I had hacksawed all the little screws off and I couldn’t figure out how to get the cover back on. If I hadn’t seen that cover come off there with my own two eyes, I would have bet you a good dog that the cover was off something else.

I plugged the computer in and hit the magic button. The thing fired right up and I used it for about three more years.

Now that baling wire was not ever intended to be used to fix a computer. It might have worked out alright, but that definitely was not the tool for the job. I learned two things from that close encounter with the computer kind.

The first is to not be afraid to dive into something you don’t know anything about. You might surprise yourself with what you can do.

The second is that if you have to use a hacksaw to get into something, you should probably stay out of it. Let someone that knows what they are doing get the job done right the first time–without duct tape and rusted wire from a horse pen.

If you work with networks in any serious way then you will almost certainly have come across WireShark by now  (or Ethereal as it was formerly known).

Anyway, Laura Chappell who writes a well known blog “Inside Laura’s Lab” has now come out with a book to help us network techy types make the most of WireShark.

In her words:

Laura Chappell’s Wireshark Network Analysis book is filled with tips, tricks and techniques for new and experienced analysts, this will be a must-have book.

Get your book from the usual places or direct from WireSharkU or ChappellU and use this code: 998nws35 to get a 35% discount. The discount is valid until March 29th 2010 and only works on the two listed sites.

This looks awesome and I want one.

However it isn’t available until Q4 2010 according to the makers (22moo) website and although I’m not a huge gamer I can see where and how this could be of benefit even to me.

Some of its features are (will be):

• Styling to compliment iPod/iPhone with optimized design for ergonomics and comfort
• 2000mAh Lithium-ion Battery for additional power for your iPod touch / iPhone
• LED showing charging state and capacity
• 8-way D-Pad with 6 buttons
• Built-in Stereo speakers
• Highly sensitive omni directional Mic
• 3.5mm audio headphone jack

No idea on price yet but I guess it’ll be in the £15 to £35 range and I’ve submitted my name for a review of one – will see what happens there.

I’m being a bit naughty in my continuing use of the spying word as it is one I disagree with, but it is good for the top line interest.

Anyway, in part 1 I put forth my case for ‘spying’ and in part 2 I expounded the benefits that employers, support staff and employees for that matter will gain. In this edition I want to suggest some ways you could actually go about monitoring and my prime criteria is that it has to be cheap or preferably free. (more…)

I’ve long been a fan of solarwinds and love using their free tools.

I just wish I could afford to play with some of their paid for tools as they look ultra cool and ultra geeky. That suits me just fine.

The latest free tool to their stable is the “Network Config Generator“.

It looks like it could be a really useful tool to anyone who has a dislike of configuring network devices. There appears to be little restriction on what type of network devices that can be configured by it from firewalls to routers to switches so long as they have a CLI style access.

You can create your own configurations or you can utilise a template. The tool comes with a few templates already built in and more accessible via Thwack (solarwinds forum / resource site) and they are likely wanting to rely on the massed ranks of network engineers to supply more – and I’m certain that will happen.

I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet myself as it requires a live connection to a device and I don’t have any to hand.

Anyway, check it out if you need it and let me know how you get on.

I got this email yesterday:

Over the past couple of days I’ve been thinking about Wi-Fi being provided free (secure and filtered) by churches and Christians. The idea came to me when I noticed a guy outside of my house in the cold, winter weather accessing my wireless with some kind of hand held device. I was thinking that it would be cool if people were able to access a connection for free BUT there would always be one pop-up at the beginning of the access…sort of a “provided by” message along with some other message. like info about a church or group or the gospel message for that matter, or maybe a link with info on donating to specific charities or disaster relief. I would think that would be only a minor inconvenience if one was able to access the internet for free. What are you’re thoughts on that?

I confess my first thought would not have been a charitable one if I’d seen someone outside my house trying to access my wifi. First I’d think best of luck and then I’d instantly change my pre-shared key . Me, paranoid?

But to answer the question the answer I gave was “I love the idea” … (more…)

I’ve been reading a lot recently and even had an email or two as well as an uncle requesting my personal services with regards to data recovery. So it has caused me to think, can I add my own recipe for data recovery?

The caveats that apply here are:

• This is all my opinion
• This is what has worked for me
• I am not a data recovery expert but have always been successful during the last 25yrs or so.
• Your mileage may vary.

That said, I have had a reasonable amount of experience including my own to work on.

The first rule of any data recovery is:

Don’t Panic

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