’tis the season for change…

September 1, 2011 |   |  2 Comments  |  Personal

This weekend is Labor Day in the US, which typically signals the end of “cultural summer” (as opposed to astronomical or climatological summers, which still have several weeks left around here). It’s also the end of one season of my life and the beginning of another.

For the last five years, I’ve been on the IT staff at Resurrection, and seen a tremendous amount of change, and learned an awful lot about an industry that I didn’t even realize existed five years ago. It’s now time for me to move on. Today at staff chapel, I announced that I will be leaving my current position on October 6, and venturing off to start my own consulting business where I can apply much of what I learned at Resurrection and share that knowledge with smaller churches and businesses who don’t have an IT staff. It is a calling I’ve been feeling for some time now, and it’s time to make the terrifying leap.

The next several weeks will be a whirlwind of winding down at Resurrection, and winding up a new business. I’m gonna get a crash course in accounting, business law, trademarks, and whatnot.

I still plan on being active in CITRT (you all are like extended family!), and showing up to as many events as time and money permit.If you know of a church or small business in and around Kansas and Missouri that has IT needs, please pass the word that I’m happy to help. I’ll post further details in this space as the website comes online.

(oh, and Resurrection is going to be needing another network administrator. Let me know if you know someone who might fit the bill)

Browser-aware player code, revisited

August 24, 2011 |   |  2 Comments  |  streaming, Wowza

I posted a while back about selecting video players based on browsers… It was an ugly javascript hack, and since then LongTail has updated their excellent JWPlayer to support multiple methods. In order to create an embed that worked best for supporting both HTML5 and Flash players, I had to dig through the documentation a little bit, and combine a couple of different sections.

Here’s how to embed JWPlayer 5.7 to try flash first, with multiple bitrates, and then attempt HTML5 if Flash is not supported. This particular scenario is for iOS support.

<script type="text/javascript" src="jwplayer.js"></script>

<div id="container">Loading the player ...</div>

<script type="text/javascript">
        jwplayer("container").setup({
                height: 360,
                width: 480,
                image: "http://server.com/images/thumbnail.jpg",
                skin: "bekle.zip",
                modes: [
                        {
                        type: "flash",
                        src: "player.swf",
                        config: {
                                levels: [
                                        { bitrate: 250, file: "playlist-low", width: 320 },
                                        { bitrate: 500, file: "playlist-high", width: 480 }
                                        ],
                                streamer: "rtmp://streamer.com:1935/live",
                                provider: "rtmp"
                                }
                        },
                        {
                        type: "html5",
                        config: {
                                file: "http://streamer.com/live/ipad.smil/playlist.m3u8"
                                }
                        } ]
                }
        );
</script>

This still doesn’t support RTSP and other HTML5  fallbacks due to limitations in JWPlayer, so if you’re on a BlackBerry, you’ll still need to switch the player. The order that the “type” statements appear in the javascript determines the order in which they’ll be tried. Generally, you’ll want to try Flash first, otherwise browsers that support HTML5 but not Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming (which is pretty much all of them), will default to the HTML5 player, but be unable to get the stream. You can, however, provide multiple video sources with different codecs (for on-demand content) to support the different flavors of browsers, though.

Windows Updates to go… not so much?

August 15, 2011 |   |  1 Comment  |  Haiti, IT

I posted a few weeks ago about bringing a WSUS machine down to Haiti as a sort of proxy – unfortunately, this project turned out to be a bust.

Conceptually, it worked. Machines were getting updates, and everything was great… until it started blowing out the CMOS settings and bluescreening a couple times a day. I suspect it’s probably power-related, but in any case, it was far from stable enough to leave unattended.

Wowza Stream Class Playlist Generator

July 18, 2011 |   |  5 Comments  |  Wowza

I’ve received a few comments and e-mails to my post about the Wowza Stream Class asking if I had any kind of playlist generator. I have something in Excel that I use for our weekly live stream and scheduled rebroadcasts. It may require heavy modification to suit your purposes, but it’s helpful to really see how a playlist can come together.

The sheet makes heavy use of some utterly absurd CONCATENATE functions.

Download : WowzaPlaylistGenerator.xlsx

 

Playlist Generator Configuration

Playlist Generator Output

 

 

Windows Updates, To Go!

July 7, 2011 |   |  1 Comment  |  Haiti, Hardware, IT

When I leave for my trip to Haiti in a few weeks, one of the things I’ll be doing is bringing multiple computers up to current patches. There are a few ways to do that:

One is to bring some sort of removable media (optical or flash stick) down and apply them manually. The problem with this is that once I leave, the machines stay in their current state until the next geek can come down and apply the next batch of patches. Downloading patches for multiple machines over developing-world internet connections can easily run into daily bandwidth caps, and Windows Update doesn’t cache very well through a normal proxy server such as Squid.

Another is to use Windows Server Update Services (WSUS). I initially considered setting up a Windows Server VM on my laptop, syncing up the updates stateside and temporarily configuring the machines down there to pull from my impromptu update server. Then I got the idea that a lightweight appliance-type server that lived down there permanently would be a useful solution that would download the patches once and distribute them over the LAN. Since we’re planning on using Microsoft Security Essentials for anti-malware, this solves the problem of definition updates. Daily patch sync would happen in the wee hours of the morning when the oversubscribed connections in Haiti are generally pretty clear.

I rummaged around the office and found a Dell FX160 thin client that we got as a demo unit from Dell (I have a number of blog posts on the topic of this device). It has been gathering dust for some time as it’s hobbled with a 1GB SATA flash disk and limited RAM. After checking on hardware requirements for both Windows Server and WSUS, I went out and picked up a 120GB SSD and a pair of 2GB RAM sticks and put them in. The choice of an SSD wasn’t so much for performance reasons (although it can’t hurt), but for the machine to be entirely solid-state. It’s going to live in a fairly harsh environment where mechanical failures are likely.

Once I got the hardware put together, I hooked up a USB optical drive and loaded Windows Server 2003 R2, and then installed WSUS and performed an update sync. The whole process went mostly smoothly.

Here are a few of the gotchas in installing Windows 2003 on an FX160 thin client, a job it was NEVER meant to do:

  • SATA controller needs to be in ATA mode. If it’s in AHCI mode, Windows 2003 will not recognize the disk.
  • When using a storage device that the BIOS recognizes as a hard drive, it expects to see a fan plugged into the motherboard. This fan is part of the hard drive bracket kit (Dell P/N H224H). When a fan is not detected, each boot will require a manual intervention during POST to press F1.
  • Stock Windows 2003 media does not include video drivers or network drivers for the FX160 (Broadcom NetXTreme 57XX).
  • Dell’s support site doesn’t have the most recent drivers for the Broadcom.
  • It’s virtually impossible to find a 6″ SATA extension connector, either for data, power, or both. I was finally able to find a power extension, but used a standard SATA cable to connect to the other SATA port on the motherboard.

The SSD I used for this is an OCZ Agility 3, 120GB. Disk performance on large writes is almost 100MB/sec, which is about twice as fast as my 7200RPM spindle drive in my laptop. Windows performs very well with 4GB, a SSD, and a 1.6GHz Atom processor.

The next step was to configure the clients to update from the server for testing. I still have one of the Asus netbooks that we deployed to Haiti in a previous trip. This is where I discovered that Windows Home and Windows Starter don’t include the policy editor (gpedit.msc) that I’m used to finding on Pro/Enterprise/Ultimate versions of windows. This is understandable, your average home user doesn’t (and shouldn’t) normally jack with system policy. Fortunately, all the policy editor does is manipulate registry keys, and the process of configuring Windows Update via the registry is well documented. This actually simplifies things, since all I have to do is create a .reg file that I can import on all the target machines.

Next post: Installing Squid. Not content to use this box for mere update caching, we’re gonna have it be our web proxy as well.

Configuring Perl for ASSP on Debian

May 23, 2011 |   |  Comment  |  IT

Quick and dirty apt-get string to install all the requisite perl modules (and associated dependencies) for ASSP on Debian:


apt-get install libcompress-zlib-perl libdigest-md5-file-perl libdigest-sha1-perl libemail-valid-perl libemail-send-perl libemail-mime-perl libfile-readbackwards-perl libclamav-client-perl libweb-simple-perl libmail-spf-perl libmail-srs-perl libnet-cidr-lite-perl libnet-dns-perl libnet-ldap-perl libnet-smtp-server-perl libunix-syslog-perl

Veeam’s Next Big Thing

May 16, 2011 |   |  Comment  |  IT

VeeamHyper-VIt’s official – Veeam is announcing this morning that version 6 of their award-winning backup/replication software will support Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization hypervisor. The new version is due out later this year.

What’s Cool about Veeam and Hyper-V

Veeam is once again delivering IT magic by building their own Changed Block Tracking functionality into Hyper-V for some of the highly efficient backup and replication that Veeam is known for. This is going to go a long way toward bringing Microsoft virtualization up to par with VMware. Also included are file-level restore and virtual lab provisioning, as well as SCOM integration.

For non-profits, this is potentially huge, since it brings advanced backup capabilities to the hypervisor that’s included with Windows Server. VMWare is great technology, but for SMB and non-profits, VMWare’s pricing point is painful. When non-profit/education customers can get Windows Datacenter licenses for around $300 a socket (which includes Hyper-V!), suddenly VMWare looks really painful, even after educational discount.

What’s still missing

The initial release will not include Veeam’s U-AIR capability, but they’re hard at work to bring that capability online.

It also lacks the ability to back up/replicate across virtualization platforms, but that’s to be expected.

Veeam hasn’t yet announced pricing/licensing details. What I’d really like to see from Veeam is a per-socket license that is platform-independent.

If you haven’t yet experienced the awesomeness that is Veeam, give the folks at Mirazon a call. Those guys know Veeam up and down and backwards.

Veeam’s Rick Vanover has more at his blog.

Kicking Skype Up a Notch

April 24, 2011 |   |  Comment  |  IT, streaming

A few weeks ago, our Senior Pastor asked for some assistance with setting up a skype video conference so that Adam could participate in a meeting being held in Texas. The alternative was to have him fly down to Dallas for a 1-hour meeting, effectively blowing out an entire day of productive hours.

We don’t currently have a dedicated video conference system, so we had to improvise.

We scheduled the meeting in our studio and coordinated with the other end to make the conference happen via Skype.

On our end, we took Adam’s MacBook Pro, and hooked up a Canon XL2 via FireWire for the video, a Shure wired lapel mic hooked to the camera (for phantom power) and then the audio output from the camera into the MacBook’s line-level audio input (because it appears that Skype doesn’t recognize the audio device on the XL2). We then connected the audio and display output from the mac into a 40″ LCD TV.

Here’s what it looked like:

The end result is a conference that looks and sounds excellent.