Adventures of ISA Server

Well over the Christmas holiday, one of our great volunteers and I finally, after two years of holding off for rediculous excuses put of firewall in place. We redid all the IP's of our internal and external network, moved all trafic over to ISA Server, and everything has been working great.

Just for some humor here is some of the mistakes we have made.

1. Made FTP read only

2. Accidentally blocked all traffic comming into the building

3. Had FTP and Web on the same ISA policy, blocking FTP traffic since web came first.

4. Trying many different ways to get VPN to work, none of which have been really sucessful. It seems to work some of the time but not all of the time. I am wondering if we really need to be running DNS and all those other services on the ISA box. That has worked the best so far. Any one else have any experience with this?

Well that was this last Christmas break...

SPAM Statistics

We have been using Computer Associates for about two years now and I have not really looked a logs much. As with any one in the church IT world, its just busy and when you know the SPAM filtering is working, why really bother to see how many its catching. Here are the statistics for the 2006 year. We have caught alot of SPAM, and its was very cheap to do so.

Time Issues

Our mature adult / missions pastor, James has been having many problems with his laptop recently. Surprising enough, it is the only laptop that is not a Latitude, its an Inspiron. He is on the list to get a new one this June when the new fiscal year starts, so we are just trying to get by. You might be asking what this is leading to. He sent me an email this morning saying his computer said it was 3:38 AM and the computer was not progressing in time, but instead it was subtracting time (great for all of us who wish we could go back in time). I thought this was really weird. Being only part time, I didnt get in untill 12:30 today. When I came in I immediatly realized that the problem was not on just his PC but on every PC. After a quick observation- the domain controller had locked up, and we didnt have secondary one setup. So after changing the time on the DC, installing a few updates and rebooting the rest of the servers to get them to sync again we were back up in service. It made for an interesting day. It makes me wonder though- would a secondary domain controller have helped in this, or would we still have the same problem. Also- it made all our emails say they were comming in at weird times and that did not fix it self once I fixed the issue. Any one have any sugestions? -Austin

Current Projects

Well I thought I would just share some current projects I have right now. 1. Installing and configuring ISA Server as our firewall with CA Secure Content Manager for webfiltering 2. Researching and implementing a backup system with policies to follow. (we currently are really not prepared for much of a disaster.) 3. Finish cabling our youth complex for future check-in PC's. (cables are run and just need crimped and punched down.) 4. Continue to research and eventually come to a conclusion with the help of a great team of people on a new ChMS. 5. Website redesign and implementation of many new features (online giving, small groups manangement, teachers section, worship leaders section... etc- some currently done through a dotnetnuke portal system) Well thats the big stuff.

Email SPAM Filtering

Over the last year, our spam has continuously increased and it has been a constant battle to keep under control. We are using some really powerful software form Computer Associates called Secure Content Manager. Once it is up, it works well. The ammount of time it takes to get it up and working well is the problem, it also takes alot of resources from the server, and requires a SQL database. Today the though passed through my head to look more into Postini for that aspect of the network. I know alot of other church's and businesses are using it. What are some some of yall's thoughts on it? -Austin