Current Projects

If you’ve been following along you should know that I’m turning to the Dark Side!  That’s right!  We’re going to be installing a Windows Server on our network.  After trying alternatives and trying to find a way around it, we’ve finally given up and are going to use Exchange.  Now there are some good alternative groupware and mail applications out there, but none of them work as well with Outlook as Exchange does, and my users want to use Outlook.  So I’ve setup a test VM this week using a trial version of SBS 2003 R2.  So far so good.  No real problems.  Of course since I’m using SBS I can’t setup a trust relationship with my Samba-LDAP-controlled domain.  So for testing purposes I’ve just setup a seperate domain and some dummy accounts and I’ll run some tests and check some stats to see how this will effect performance.  Then sometime in the next month we’ll probably get the full version and I’ll have to setup the Windows Server as the PDC and the samba server as a member server.  This setup should work fine, and shouldn’t require much reconfiguring of our current setup.  We’ll still use Samba as the file server, but authenticate with AD.

I’ve ordered some new phone equipment so we can do some minor upgrades to our current system.  We’ve run out of room to add more phones, but the equipment coming in should give us the ability to add an aditional ~64 phones.  We’re in the middle of a big construction project and when it’s done we’ll need 6 new phones, so this upgrade should do us for awhile.

Since we are moving to AD, I’ve started looking into the ability to authenticate our Squid/Dansguardian box with AD.  It looks like it’s possible, so I’ll let you know how it turns out.  The goal would be to have the ability to customize Dansguardian’s filters for certain users.  Don’t have a need for that for the church, but our school could use it.  In fact Todd, the school IT guy, has specifically asked me recently if different filtering rules could be setup for teachers and students.  So I’ll do some testing and write up a howto, if it works.

The new backup system is going well, and the current setup made it pretty easy to add our Windows Server VM to the network.  The Windows VM should be automagically included in the backups without any extra configuration, so I think my plan has been successful.

Well, that’s a quick overview of some of the things I’ve been working on.  Not to mention we’ve been switching hosting on all the church’s sites, and I’ve switched on my personal sites.  So the migrating web pages and databases has been going on in my spare time.

That’s it for now.