It’s midnight, and I’m finally getting around to blogging about the day. It was a profitable day, having the opportunity to network with a group of other church IT professionals as well as the IT-curious. One lady was completely blown away that any church had even one full-time IT professional.

Here’s some of the topics we covered:

• Training - How do you train your users on technology topics?
  • Cool tool for training: Sony AirBoard - Get people involved in the training. Write on AirBoard and it shows up on the projector screen.
• E-mail marketing - Constant Contact is coming soon with 2-way sync to ACS. Another alternative solution used is ChurchPost.com.
• Text messaging - ChurchCast was discussed as a solution to send out a mass text to selected church groups. For instance, if the bus brakes down on the way back from youth camp, the youth pastor could activate ChurchCast to send an SMS to all parents telling them, “Flat tire on bus. All kids are safe. Delayed 2 hours.”
• Network monitoring / filtering / etc
  • Barracuda 210
  • GTA Firewall and GB-Ware
  • Wireshark University
  • PRTG - I’m definitely looking into this
  • What’s Up
  • IP Monitor - supposedly better than What’s Up
• Worship Attendance - what creative methods are you using to measure worship attendance? Directional infrared cameras to count number in and out of worship center, pew pads, individual cards, overhead cameras, installing chairs instead of pews in order to more easily count.

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.

Yesterday I wrote about securing your network. While I know that it is by no means a complete discussion on firewalls, let’s move on to talk in a little more detail about content filtering.

Our church has the highest grade of “business class” cable Internet available. It meets and even exceeds our needs for normal Internet browsing, giving each user sufficient speed for most uses. Unfortunately, they offer no sort of content filtering on the ISP side. Translation: all pages are by default accessible to all users, even “those” sites.

Well, it takes no Einstein to realize that this isn’t a good idea for a church. In fact, it’s a downright bad idea, specifically since we offer free WiFi to anyone who requests the passkey and have a computer lab for the little kiddos.

So, what options are available for content filtration?

1. Well, we could pay for client-side software for each machine. Ummm, no.
2. We could switch to an ISP with content filtering built in. That’d be a great option except for the fact that we don’t have a high-speed filtered provider in our area.
3. We could buy/lease a network filter like Barracuda or iPrism. These are very expensive, but they are GREAT for large organizations. Ours isn’t that big.
4. So, we chose Linux. It’s free, it’s fast, it’s efficient, and did I mention free?

We’re using DansGuardian as our content filter. The open-source DansGuardian is free for all non-commercial users. The creator also has a commercial version available through the fine folks at SmoothWall, known as SmoothGuardian.

DansGuardian works well with a huge blacklist of blocked sites, but it doesn’t rely on it. In fact, you don’t even *have* to have a blacklist. See, Dans also reads the HTML of each page you view scanning for banned phrases, URLs, PICS ratings, and more. If it sees a dirty word on a page, it blocks it, whether or not it exists in a blacklist. You can see the benefits of this straight away. Thousands of pornographic and otherwise obscene pages are created daily, and no blacklist could ever hope to keep up with them.

If you haven’t already, install a content filter in your church - it may save someone from developing a horrible addiction. (By the way, parents can also use DansGuardian at home)

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.