Diocesan Council Technology Committee

Diocese of Newark Technology Committee Tuesday, September 27, 2005 Agenda and Notes

Present: Planning to attend: Jan Paxton, John Rollins, Russ Worthington, Scott Bennett, Dennis and Barbara Piccirillo, Steve Boston, Nina Nicholson, Michael Francaviglia

Next Meeting: - Wednesday, November 30, 2005 - 6:30 PM dinner -Christ Church, John Cooks - rsvp <rector@christchurchpompton.org>

Agenda: Technology Committee Meeting
Technology committee e-mail list is:
technology@email.dioceseofnewark.org

Proposed Agenda:

1. List Servs & Clayton Crawley *See Note
   Clayton Crawley is the CIO at CPG and came out to meet with us and let us know what is going on a CPG with the web hosting and fleshed out the note below. Recommendation: If you have a Q-mail list, keep a pdf file with the list so you can e-mail it to cpg in case of the need to restore. Check all of the settings in the distribution lists - it is now easier to use, but double check things like who can send to the list.
2. The Web Site - John displayed what is set to go...almost. Everyone at Episcopal House has reviewed it and made revisions. The page will expand to full size. It's waiting for a blessing from Senior staff. Jan Hardy's Bethsaida Team issues will be resolved once the site map is completed - after the new look goes live. The listserv will be changed so that all e-mail addresses we have will be added and then anyone who wants to can opt out. There will be a new welcome message and a new footer message and a list police person, probably a member of senior staff. This will need to be done at Episcopal House.
3. Wireless Lans - Steve is concerned about a program for helping churches set up wireless lans. See if there is any interest in a training on this stuff. Russ suggested that an article for the Voice would be a way of seeing if there is interest. Steve suggested using the Newark list and having a spring workshop on this. Michael asked about doing it at Creative Congregations. Steve will send a note to the new improved Newark list to see what interest there is. Russ has the related topic of internet phone service. We have 2 workshops. Steve will test interest.
4. 2006 Budget - Russ needs help with wording for this year's application. Steve will e-mail the wording from the past. We have not spent anything for the last 2 years. The back-up bulb is being used, so it is time to buy a new back-up bulb. Scott has a name of someone who can get us a good deal.
5. New Projector for Episcopal House? John is bringing us the information that 31 Mulberry has an old and a new projector. The old one will only go to 800 res and needs to be replaced because some of the new computers will not step down that far. We want something that will run about $1100 or $1200 from Infocus. There are others...John says go to the web and look. If we have the money, we should spend it for the projector! Russ will ask John Zinn and get it and its backup bulb ordered asap.
6. Katie Palmer is now the network admin. and is now Voice Editor. Michael feels that he needs to be able to hire a network techie on-call to come in and install things and maintain the systems. Nina is giving Michael a name of someone who may be able to help. The technical work is more than Katie really has the time to handle because it's not really her specialty.

Not Attending: Katie Palmer, Ken Boccino, Rob Coonce, Rebecca Clement, Louie Crew

*Note: I've been in meetings until now but wanted to make an offer to attend your meeting in person to answer any questions that may come up. I'll be glad to have my schedule meet your requirements, simply let me know the time and location of the meeting. Here are brief answers to your questions below:

1. The Cause: Let me start by saying that there is no excuse for what happened with the servers. The servers had been specified by me to be backed up daily but after the failure it became apparent that this was not happening. This was a failure in personnel and management that has been addressed. More fundamental to the cause was that we had two different hard drives fail and, while the disk array was redundant internally, the technology was not able to function with multiple drive failures.
2. The Resolution: We sent the drive array to one vendor who restored the data but could not restore the file system, then we flew another vendor into our co-location site in New Jersey to restore the file system.
3. The Delay: Because we had to go through two vendors this caused almost two weeks to elapse before we had full recovery of the server array.
4. What we Learned: That we were treating dioceses in the same manner that we work with our own servers. Sometimes it is better to have several non-integrated servers rather than one monumental server. We have to have the single server approach here at CPG but we're going to move to a non-integrated server approach for our diocesan customers.
5. Prevention Measures: Backups are being done. We've moved to a more robust form of striping that will allow two disk failures and are reworking the entire server infrastructure to work independently across dioceses with machine backups rather than data backups.
6. The system audit has taken place and was completed a week ago by an independent consultant. We are going to start staging the new approach this week on a test server. Once that is complete, we will begin purchasing new hardware and moving customers over to the new structure.
7. The Qmail problems last week were on lists that were not tested during the restore. We haven't had any Qmail outages in the past three weeks (we did have one routing slow down in Indianapolis). This said, the problem is still our issue as we didn't have a good administrative function for capturing, restoring, and testing the lists. This will be a part of the new server infrastructure.
8. I am sorry to lose anyone because of problems we've had, we're not interested in making excuses only getting better for those dioceses and parishes that are willing to work with us in the future. Please let me know if I can flesh out any of these brief remarks and again, I'd be more than happy to join the committee tomorrow and answer these and other questions personally.

Clayton