On the way to RefreshCache 2009

Joel and I are somewhere on the I-10 in Arizona. Its late and Im tired but figured this might wake me up. I had a thought on the SVN setup the community currently uses. While I appreciate the work Arena has put into the svn hosting service we currently use, and I always hate to admit that Microsoft ever did anything right, I wonder if it makes good sense to move our indivual stuff over to Codeplex. The current system really doesnt allow for the integration of discussions, patches, and bug tracking that codeplex does. As well codeplex puts the access control into the hands of the church so we dont have to ask the Arena guys to do anything.

It seems like it would be easy to setup a single High Desert Church project with categories for the small projects. If we do a large project, like CCCEVs check-in system, it can become its own project. But now I have everything in version control and can easily take feature requests or even have people submit ready-to-go patches that I simply merge into trunk.

Personally, I find the bug tracker and discussion section to be of the most use. Having a spot to populate bugs that I have found that I need to fix at somepoint, or bugs that others have found, is a valuable resource to development.

The one question I think I need to answer before I propose this is to find out if a project can be private so it either does not show up, or at least limits who has access to get to the code. I can see some cases where somebody might not want the code available but wants to take advantage of discussions and bug reports. I will have to ask Nick or Jason about that since they already have a project up.

Arena Upgrade

We upgraded Arena yesterday.  Our goal was to be done at a reasonable time, but things never go as planned.  Our plan was to do a complete re-install of the system to bring it up to Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Arena 2009.1.200 and VMWare ESXi 4.0.  The idea behind VMWare is that now in the future we can snapshot before we do any major change so that if something goes wrong we just roll back the system and either give up or try again.

We spent about 3 hours getting Windows, SQL Server, etc. installed; taking snapshots along the way.  We saw that VMWare had a max virtual HDD size of 2TB, so we made a 2TB disk for Arena, might as well, right?  Wrong.  Found out when we went to install Arena (and I went to see how many snapshots we had taken) that none of the snapshots took.  Apparently VMWare needs to resize a disk image to add 4GB per 256GB when it first starts doing snapshots, which would have pushed the drive to over 2TB.  oops.

So at around 2pm we started again with a 1TB volume and made sure the snapshots took.  Windows Server 2008 went in fine (except for the fact we had to wait for it to download SP2).  SQL Server 2008 also installed fine.  Though both are far more complex than their predecessors to get through the installers.  We installed all the “extra” software again with no problems. Arena also went just fine.  We installed 2009.1.100.  Imported our data. Re-ran 2009.1.100 (we had been running the beta before).  Did a quick test and then patched to 2009.1.200.

From there it was another few hours of fixing virtual host names, redirects, SSL certs, etc.  We finally finished and went home. We have a few things left to test, but we are up and running.  We still need to add all the kiosk printers (ugh) and then test them all, but we don’t expect any trouble from that.

All church check-in - SUCCESS!

It is a glorious day. The birds are singing, the sun is shining, and the wind is blowing at about 500 miles per hour. Ah, the desert… But check-in is over for the three big services, and it was a resounding success.

All told we checked in 1,174 kids over three services so far this weekend (1,328 for the entire weekend). The largest service was 527 kids. We used sixteen check-in stations, which is overkill, but made the whole process go very smoothly and quickly. By our testing calculations on Friday we can checkin roughly 100 kids per kiosk per service, not counting the task of entering families. Using the planned twelve stations (the extra four are for other classes and other parts of the campus, but we are using them for the first month or so) we should be able to checkin up to about 1000 kids per service, roughly twice what we have at our biggest service.

This photo was taken at 10:59. Last week at this time there were six lines out the door of people waiting to get to the check-in tables. This week there were a lot of people, but the lines moved quickly and most were able to checkin in under a minute. The longest amount of time was spent explaining to parents what the three labels were for. Next week, those explanations won’t be necessary, making this even faster still.

We found one bug in a beta arena dll (created for us to code around a microsoft problem) that we will get resolved this week. We also found that parents don’t believe that their kids are ever “new walkers” they are only “confident walkers” so we will remove the new walker designation… Still, the weekend was a resounding success.

Thanks again to Jason and Nick at CCCEV for writing the checkin module we are using, and to the guys at Arena for creating a database powerful enough for us to pull this off. Also props to the volunteers around HDC that helped us pull this off. From the kids team to the IT volunteers to the guys that helped us fit out the kiosks, build the back panels for power and ethernet, fill the bottoms with sand etc. it was a true team effort.

Time to celebrate!

Joel (Original post here)

Childrens checkin, take one

Well we did our first run at checkin on Sunday night at our Seven service. We managed to check in 121 kids with the computers. I believe we only had one family that we had to check in on paper, and we are pretty sure we have already fixed the problem we had with them. Most everybody was pleased with the new system and I think even the problems we had people realize thar this will be a huge time saver once the few minor bugs we encountered are ironed out.

Kill the timeout

After 5 and a half months we have finally managed to modify the in-activity timeout of Arena. It seems the ASP Session State timeout is not the only thing that needs to be changed. Lets not even talk about the fact you can change it in 4 different places, each having it’s own distinct value. We also had to update the forms authentication timeout (thanks Nick!) value. Now both are set to 60 minutes and our people are much happier not having to log in after a phone call.

Children’s Check-in

We got the go ahead last week for the computerized children’s check-in system. We looked around but couldn’t find any kiosk stations that we liked. For the most part they were either essentially a podium on wheels or were all-in-one systems based on PCs instead of Macs. To boot the all-in-ones were pretty pricey.

We are also doing some final picks on label printers and touch-screens. I got some inquiries in to some other churches in our area that I can drive down and try any touch-screens they have to see how we like them compared to what we have now (we have a few ELO screens, but they are way too sensitive). We ordered a Zebra GK420d with the Ethernet option to test run, though we are hoping to not have to use the Ethernet version as that will shave a decent chunk of change off the project.

We chose, by the way, the web-based check-in system from CCCEV. There are a few changes our kids team has requested, but nothing they need made before we go live. They are pretty happy with the interface out of the box.

Implementing VMware ESXi 3.5

As we move forward with Arena, we are trying to get some volunteers to come in and work on small projects for us. Being that they are volunteers we really don’t want to give them full access to the database, but we also don’t have another machine to setup. So we wiped out Development machine and re-installed it with VMware ESXi. So far so good. I have documented most of the server install process of the actual OS under the Arena section. Once the primary development virtual box is up and running I will begin installing a second development box that will have a test database for our volunteers to work with. This should give them the ability to build stuff without having to give them the whole database access.

As I said, so far so good. I am really liking what can be done with VMware ESXi. For awhile now we have been putting ISO disc images on our file server so we have digital backups incase a disc gets scratched or lost, as well as generally we can just mount the iso and install from it without needing a disc. Since VMware ESXi can mount NFS shares, I added the vmware machine’s IP address to the NFS list and was able to mount it as a datastore. Then I just selected the Windows Server iso as the CD image and booted up the virtual machine. I must say the install was FAST.