Rob Thrush, the Director of Information Technology at McLean Bible Church.

Marvin Haines, the Assistant Director of Information Technology at McLean Bible Church.  Looks like Marvin has been blogging for a while, but I just discovered it now.

Welcome Rob and Marvin to the Church IT Blogging world!  Make sure to add them to your RSS reader.

Catch all of us at the upcoming DC Church IT Roundtable.

Share This

Today, in the Coptic Orthodox Church, we commemorate St. Athanasius, the 20th Patriarch of the See of St. Mark. A few of his notable contributions to the Christian faith are:

• Main author of the Nicene Creed
• Wrote On the Incarnation, a treatise affirming and explaining that Jesus Christ is both God and Man.
• First person to list the same 27 books of the New Testament, that list was later ratified by a series of synods and now is the universally recognized New Testament in use today.

Further Reading:

• Background information and writings
• St Athanasius the Great the Archbishop of Alexandria (OCA)
• Athanasius & Cyril, Patriarchs of Alexandria (GOARCH)
• Saint Athanasius the Great, Archbishop of Alexandria (Prologue of Ohrid)
• The Departure of St. Athanasius the Apostolic the 20th. Pope of Alexandria (Coptic)
• St. Athanasius the Great Icon and Story
• The Significance of St. Athanasius for the Coptic Orthodox Church (Anba Gregorius)
• Athanasius of Alexandria (OrthodoxWiki)
• Athanasius of Alexandria (Wikipedia)
• Contending for Our All (John Piper)

Share This

Scroll down on the right for a couple of new widgets:

• Skribit allows you to suggest and vote on future blog topics. Hat to tip to Matt Farina.
• If you want the play by play on what I am up to you can follow me on twitter or check out my status below.

Share This

Recently I have gotten quite a few questions about why we chose to move stmarkdc.org from Joomla! to Drupal. Our main motivators were Drupal’s taxonomy system that allows for tagging with granular access control (allows a ministry to update only their section and nothing else) and polished multi-lingual support. Drupal is a little more complex to get up and running but for sites with a lot of content the flexibility is great.

We are looking forward to moving OrthodoxSermons.org to Drupal in the near future, we have begun talks with a vendor who is an expert in Drupal media sites - more details coming soon.

More reading on Joomla! versus Drupal:
Drupal and Joomla comparison - CMS Report
Joomla and Drupal - Which One is Right for You? - Alledia
Why can’t we be friends? Joomla versus Drupal - Communicopia
Comparing Joomla vs Drupal Content Management Systems - Ye Olde Rad Blog II
Joomla 1.5 & Drupal 6.1 Performance Comparison - CMS Report

Share This

Rob Thrush, the Director of Information Technology at McLean Bible is getting a Fellowship One Regional Users Group (RUG) going…last week he sent out a few details and also mentioned that a blog is in the works.

Greetings all,

I must start by apologizing for not getting our Regional Users Group (RUG) started sooner.  God has a way of adding new dimensions to life that sometimes need to be addressed before moving on to other things.  Nuff said on that.Well, the Fellowship One Users and Developers Conference is coming up in a couples of weeks (May 15-17, 2008).  If you haven’t signed up yet and still want to attend it looks like you can still do so by going to http://www.dynamicchurchconference.com/registration#.  On that note there is going to be a RUG Breakfast on Friday the 16th at 6:45am.  I mention this because I will not be able to attend the conference because of prior commitments (my son-in-law is receiving his commission in the Air Force on the 16th and I am part of that ceremony!).  So if any of you are planning on attending the conference and would like to attend this breakfast meeting and represent the Fellowship One Mid Atlantic Regional Users Group (F1MARUG) please let me know and I will pass that on to Fellowship One.

So. When do we hold our first meeting?  I have been struggling with this for some time now.  I had hoped to have our “Kick Off” meeting well before the conference but I am not going to be able to accomplish that one I’m afraid.  So, what’s a good date?  I have a couple of dates to throw out and see what your thoughts are.  We can discuss in more detail at our kick off meeting how best to proceed for future meetings, but I thought we could have the first, or Kick Off, meeting here at McLean Bible church.  I am trying to set up a conference bridge so that if you cannot make the meeting in person you can do so at least by phone.  So, the dates to consider are Monday June 9th, Tuesday June 10th or Wednesday June 18th.  I’m not sure what day of the week works best for everyone so I have thrown out a few different days.  I thought we could start the meeting around 10:00am and end no later than 2:00pm; or earlier if we finish all of our discussions; or later if we get on a roll.  I would like to hear back from you by Thursday May 29th , if possible, whether any of these days work for you so that we can finalize our plans.

…

Thanks,
Rob

I’ll post more information on the RUG as it comes along.

Share This

By God’s grace, OrthodoxSermons.org is proud to report that it’s library has now exceeded over 1,000 sermons in less than 2 years with many more to come. Thank you to all have contributed sermons and to all who have helped support this website. You are helping spread God’s word to all the ends of the earth!

We have now begun planning for OrthodoxSermons.org 2.0, a complete redesign which hopefully will be easier to use with better search, categorization and many more features.  We would love your feedback on how we can improve the site and what you would like to see in the next version.  Please leave a comment with your thoughts.

Share This

Rob Thrush and his team at McLean Bible will be hosting the next DC Church IT Roundtable on Thursday, May 22nd at 11:30 AM.

McLean Bible Church Tysons Campus - 8925 Leesburg Pike, Vienna, VA 22182
Room 1410 (off first level entrance by the water falls)

Please comment below if you will be joining us and if you have any special requests for topics.

What’s a Roundtable Discussion? (Taken from Jason Lee’s Blog)
A roundtable is a peer-learning event where the participants are both teachers and learners. A roundtable is small enough to emphasize interactive learning, led by a facilitator and peer, includes participants who have an affinity with each other, and does not include a strong agenda beyond sharing knowledge. The participants set the agenda, and interaction among participants takes precedent over presentation by “experts.” In fact, in one-way or another, most of the roundtable participants are already experts. In this group, we intend to learn from each other about how to better resource, equip, and train ministries in the areas of computer hardware, networking, server support, web services/sites, telecom services, etc. It will be geeky and fun.

Please see citrt.org for additional church IT community resources.

Share This

Testing out Neokast to push a 887 kbps live video stream (640×480 24 fps). Seems to be working pretty well, only downsides are that it is Windows only and requires a plugin. We had around 25 users on it earlier today with no major hiccups.

You can check it out during any one of our Holy Pascha services this week.

Further reading: Bob Cringley - The $7 TV Network: Neokast brings multicasting to the masses.

Share This

Most of our infrastructure is running on ancient Dell 6450 servers with quad PIII 550 processors. We have been looking forward to making the jump to a virtualized environment and the pieces necessary to make that happen have just arrived.

Yesterday, we managed the new servers outfitted with the additional hard drives, memory and processors and then load them into the cabinet. We will use the top two servers to run VMware Server on top of CentOS and the bottom will be our “SAN” running iSCSI Enterprise Target on CentOS.

Specifications:
VMware Servers (both boxes are identical)
HP ML370G5
2 Dual-Core Xeon 2.66 Processors
10GB ECC DDR II SDRAM
HP Smart Array P400/512 Controller
2 72GB 10K SAS

SAN
HP ML370G5
2 Dual-Core Xeon 2.66 Processors
4GB ECC DDR II SDRAM
2 HP Smart Array P400/512 Controller
16 72GB 10K SAS
SATA RAID Controller
2 750GB SATA

We had purchased a 3ware SATA RAID controller for use on the SAN box but it looks like there are memory allocation errors at the BIOS level that neither HP or 3ware have done anything to resolve so we are researching another option.

For the next few days we will just work at getting the cabling tweaked and the hardware tested and verifying driver support in CentOS.

Share This

Just wrapped up MinistryTECH and CITRT, it was truly an amazing time of fellowship and learning from my fellow Church IT brethren. Today’s quiet time reflects what is on my heart…

we are bound to give thanks to God always for you, brethren beloved by the Lord, because God from the beginning chose you for salvation through sanctification by the Spirit and belief in the truth, to which He called you by our gospel, for the obtaining of the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, brethren, stand fast and hold the traditions which you were taught, whether by word or our epistle. Now may our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, and our God and Father, who has loved us and given us everlasting consolation and good hope by grace, comfort your hearts and establish you in every good word and work. 2 Thessalonians 2:13-17

Share This