At today’s IT Roundtable at ACS’ Convention, I talked about selectively blocking some media on social networking sites. I’m being nebulous in my wording because I’m paranoid. I don’t want one of the big brothers to stumble across this post and change their sites so they break my blocks. I know it probably wouldn’t happen, but like I said - I’m being paranoid.

In any case, we block sites categorized as “Radio,” including Pandora, Last.fm, etc. I also block the below sites that are used for streaming music and video on users’ profiles.  This doesn’t block all video, but it blocks pretty much all streaming music.  We’re doing this because our staff were eating all of our bandwidth with streaming audio, so I turned it off to allow for vital ministry purposes.

Today I became an authorized reseller of AVG.  In doing so I am able to obtain AVG software at a dramatically discounted price, and I am able to pass most of that discount on to you.  The reseller program requires that I take some small profit from each sale.  However, by adding my reseller discount to the church/non-profit discount from AVG, you can lob off about 40% of the cost of the software.

So, to upgrade my 50-user license AVG Network Edition Anti-Virus, I would normally have to pay the retail price of $969 for two years.  Not so today - now I can offer the renewal for $581.  That’s $5.81 per machine per year!

If your church would like to share in the savings, let me know and I’ll help you get hooked up too.

All I can say is, “Wow! I’m impressed.”
And, “Critics are dumb.”

For my inaugural post on my fancy new church IT blog, I want to talk about the necessity of protecting your church members’ information, your church-owned computers, and each network user. I was reading Nick Nicholaou’s post about Biometrics, and I was inspired to post on network security. He wrote:

Church and ministry networks have information that, if not properly protected, could cost a lot of money in penalties plus a hurt reputation in their community.

That’s absolutely correct. If we don’t look out for our data, no one will. When I arrived at FBC, I quickly learned that the entire network was protected by an overworked $50 firewall. I don’t fault the church - they didn’t know. I’m certain that if my church overlooked this security vulnerability, many others have as well.

I don’t intend to make a case for a good firewall, but I insist that you get one. Instead, I want to give you a few pointers. Namely, you don’t have to spend a lot of money to get your hands on some excellent protection. Friends, in my humble opinion, the answer is in Linux.

Last month, I installed a Linux firewall with no out-of-pocket costs. We had a spare computer, running a 300MHz P3 and 512Mb of SDRAM. You don’t need a beast. I downloaded the latest distribution of SmoothWall Express 2.0 and the DansGuardian add-on and burned them to a CD. The SmoothWall CD boots right up and walks you through the installation procedures. The DansGuardian needs a little bit of Linux finesse.

The bottom line is that this box now sits between the Interweb and the church network. There are two network cards, one goes to the cable modem and the other to a switch. It scans everything coming in and everything going out. SmoothWall is a great firewall right “out of the box.” It has an Intrusion Detection System built right in, and it logs everything. When you add DansGuardian, you gain the ability to filter content. That’s right, it makes it nearly impossible for kiddos in the computer lab to land on inappropriate content.

More on this later.