The End of the Summer
It’s been a full sumer at Calvary Appleton (which is why I haven’t been writing as much as I would have liked), and the culmination of that Summer was our 9th Annual Great Lakes Prophecy Conference. Although the conference is always loads of fun with the great teaching, worship, and fellowship, it presents many unique technical challenges for me.
The biggest technical hurdle this year was internet connectivity. About two weeks before the conference, our ISP began having trouble and our bandwidth dropped to less-than-dialup speed. They were unable to guarantee a restoration of connectivity by the conference. I quickly began outsourcing as much of the internally hosted things as I could (email, website, etc.), but sill, without a reliable connection we would be unable to push the live video feed to the company who hosts our stream . With an average of 1000+ hits on our stream for our conferences, this was could have been a disaster. Through an interesting chain of events, I was able to secure a 8M Down – 1.5M Up connection with Time Warner Business Class. They were able to expedite the install, and we were up and running with one day to spare. (Yeah, a little too close for comfort!)
The internet connectivity problems inspired me to upgrade our network a bit. The first upgrade was at the heart of our network—the router. I replaced an aging consumer quality Linksys WRT54G (running Tomato) with a Cisco Systems 831 that I picked up on eBay. The performance increase was quite noticeable. The built in VPN features of the 831 were a huge selling point for me, as it allows me to access the network when I am out of the building.
The second upgrade addressed some wireless security concerns that I had. For the longest time, our access points used WPA-PSK. This meant that a single key was used by everyone to access the WLAN. While this was simple, it was a huge security risk (especially at conference time—when every attendee with a laptop wants access to the WLAN.) Joe Random could approach any staff member or volunteer and ask for the key, and, chances are, they would hand out the key to Mr. Random without thinking twice. This was obviously highly unacceptable. I began researching WPA Enterprise solutions, and settled on Zeroshell—a flexible, network-focused Linux distro. I installed Zeroshell on a old, unused Compaq DL580, and using the RADUIS server in Zeroshell, I set up all of our APs for WPA Enterprise. Then I created accounts for all of the staff, and bingo, the WLAN was secured! Rolling out authentication credentials to the Windows based workstations was a bit challenging, but considering our WLAN users are mostly Mac, it went fairly quickly.
The final upgrade was, I admit, a bit of an indulgence. I picked up a Apple Airport Extreme for my office. As I am often sending huge files between my MacBook Pro and my Mac Pro, the temptation of 802.11n and Gigabit Ethernet was too great. :) I’m also hoping to use the NAS features that are included for sharing files with other members of the media dept. I just installed it on Sunday, and can’t wait to put it through its paces.
Alright, I have tasks waiting for me, so I’d better wrap this up. Stay tuned; I’m planning a series on the upgrades to the Video Dept. that we installed back in spring. As always, if you want to chat, or have any questions about anything that I’ve written feel free to contact me via email: tonyk@ccappleton.org
