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.

Last week, I upgraded our network from AVG 7.5 to AVG 8.0.  It was a mostly painless process.  The 8.0 version of the software looks slick and seems to be using less resources than the previous version.  I haven’t noticed any slowdowns on machines because of it.

I was able to easily push the software to about half of the workstations through the admin console.  It works by first installing an AVG Agent which is the tool that actually does the software installation.  This process uninstalls 7.5 and installs 8.0.

For the other half of the workstations, I created an install script and had to run those on each of the machines.  I could have scripted it to run on their next log-in, but it was just as easy for me to go around the building and get it done.

I’m not sure why I couldn’t push the install to every station as I had all the appropriate ports open in their firewalls, but for some reason it didn’t work.  Unfortunately, the stations that run the install script do not fully appear in the Admin Console either.

Overall, not too bad.  We’re all protected from the latest threats, and I like the new edition.

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.