I’ve been having a lot of “fun” in the past few weeks with cloning a hard drive on a server. Let me tell you up front that I am a major penny pincher. You might remember my series on simple ways for the church to save money on operational expenditures. Some say that I’m cheap, but I prefer to be considered committed to missions and wise spending. That’s who I am. So, I end up using a lot of open source software.

I love Clonezilla. It’s an open source title comparable to Norton Ghost. Clonezilla has done some excellent things for me on a number of machines. It can really save a ton of time deploying new machines or replacing failing hard drives. Well, for some reason, it wouldn’t clone one of the partitions on Caleb’s hard drive. I did everything I knew how to do to make it work. I fixed the bad sectors, I ran tons of maintenance utilities, and I even got into the inner workings of Clonezilla and changed some of the script settings (scary, yes!).

Tonight, I bit the bullet and bought Paragon’s Drive Copy 8.5 Professional. It’s actually running right now, so I don’t have the final results, but it’s past the point that Clonezilla always crapped out. I’ve got to tell you that it looks like it’s going to be worth every penny of it’s $129 price tag. I have been pulling my hair out for weeks with this problem, and this thing looks like it’s going to do the trick. (I’ll know for sure in half an hour.)

What got me writing early on this, other than having nothing else to do but watch a progress bar, is that the rescue CD is very user friendly. It doesn’t look thrown together like so many other Linux-type rescue CD’s. It properly recognized the RAID, named the drives in easy human readable format (making it real hard to mess up the source and destination), and even lets me use the mouse. If this works, I don’t know if I’ll even install the Windows software that came with it.

So, hopefully my adventure with the Attack of the Clones is coming to an end. I’ll let you know how this thing pans out.

* UPDATE *

Drive Copy 8.5 worked like a champ!  The single drive has been successfully cloned to the RAID.  Now I’m a definite fan of Paragon Software!

I’ve been thinking about Asterisk for a while, considering replacing our PBX with Linux. I love Linux, and I love it’s affect on the church’s budget. Jon posted about linking Asterisk to their ChMS, and I got a ton more excited about it. That is simply useful, and I can imagine the days of volunteers and ministers becoming dramatically easier because of it.

Well, my find of the day was this video tutorial from Systm on how to set Asterisk up (actually posted back in 2005). IMHO, it’s 45 minutes well spent.

Well, it makes me want to get it set up in my home. Woot!

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)