Home of DJ and technophile Jonathan Puddle (aka J Puddy)
Work
Things I’ve Learned Working From Home
02 months ago
In 2007, Maija and I moved to Finland, and I’ve been working from home ever since. What started as a 3-month trial that we assumed wouldn’t work, has become a litmus for my organization; both our Executive Director and our CFO now work remotely, commuting back to the office only every few weeks. I’m lucky enough to get to stay home most of the year :) On my last few visits to the office I’ve been struck by the differences in what can be accomplished in the office, and at home. (more…)
Contracting your weaknesses: Schooley Mitchell
02 months ago
A few years ago, when I’d just been promoted to IT Manager, my predecessor encouraged me to staff my weaknesses. I’ve followed that strategy, and have had the privilege of building up some excellent staff and building some great teams. I’ve now moved into the realm of staffing my strengths, as I seek to be less of a point-of-failure, and more of a value-add to my organization. I’ve also had the privilege of working with some excellent corporate partners, and this post will the first in a short series highlighting a few of those amazing companies. These guys have totally made up for my weaknesses in various areas, and I wouldn’t be where I am today without them.
The first, is Schooley Mitchell Telecom Consultants. (more…)
On Blackbaud’s 2011 European Conference for Non-Profits
03 months ago
by Jonathan Puddle
in Work
I took the family to London last week to visit some friends, while I spent a few days in Catch The Fire’s Wembley office and attended Blackbaud’s conference for non-profits. I place high value on conferences & industry events, so I had wanted to go either the DC or the London conference; London won out due to convenience. Since we’re half-way through deployment of a couple of Blackbaud’s products, my goals were to glean as much as I could about deployment recommendations/concerns/gotchas, and to try to strengthen my relationship with Blackbaud as a company. (more…)
Speaking at Catch The Fire’s Pastors & Leaders conference
03 months ago
by Jonathan Puddle
in Work
In January 2012 I’ll be in Toronto again, speaking at Catch The Fire’s Pastors & Leaders conference. I’ll be leading 2 sessions, one on choosing a ChMS vendor (really about picking wise ministry partners), and another on leveraging technology in your church. Here’s a promo video:
I’m pretty excited, it’ll be my first major speaking opportunity, and it’s on a topic that I’m truly passionate about. These Leaders conferences are fantastic, and this year’s event is really open to everyone involved in church ministry, leadership or otherwise. I highly recommend you consider coming up to Toronto in January!
Choosing a ChMS Vendor
154 months ago
Earlier in the year we began the search for a church management software vendor. I’ve been meaning to share the process we went through, as well as our results, but haven’t had the chance to till now. We’re in the midst of a large software project, replacing all our core business software with more suitable applications. One of the needs we recognised early on was for our pastors and ministry staff to have a tool that was truly well suited to their particular needs. The process we went through is equally applicable to most kinds of software, not just ChMS.
Adding more links to the Google Apps global navigation bar
09 months ago
At Catch the Fire we use Google Apps for all our email and collaboration. We recently wanted to include some more links on the Apps global navigation bar, but were at a loss as to how to do so.
One of my team members managed to find a confusing sounding, but actually excellent solution, to this problem. Jesse Middleton posted this last year, and while some minor things have changed, it still works very well. Thanks Jesse! The basic steps are as follows:
- Register yourself with the Google Apps marketplace as a vendor.
- Create an application (with the sole purpose being to put a link on the menu bar).
- Add the application to your domain.
Because you’re not actually publishing your app to the Google Apps Marketplace, it doesn’t cost anything to do this, and won’t get in anyone’s way. You can create as many apps as you might want, for links to various things. Some enterprising individual should take this method and expand on it to allow people to rename and customise these menu items at will.
VMWare ESXi backups on-the-cheap
01 year ago
This week I needed to sort out backing up my ESXi VMs to an another location. A few Google searches brought me into contact with a fantastic set of tools to do just that. Following is the setup I made, with links to the helpful people. Thanks so much to everyone linked below.
- First you’ll need to decide on your backup location. I decided for an NFS share on my existing backup server, which is running Windows Server 2008. That meant installing the NFS tools for Windows Server 2008, and also finding an available Server 2003 machine to install the User Mapping provider on, as Server 2008 has deprecated it. Read http://miketrellosblog.arcadecab.com/2010/08/setting-up-an-nfs-share-to-receive-esxi-4-1-vm-backups/ and http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sfu/archive/2008/12/15/set-up-services-for-network-file-system-in-windows-server-2008.aspx
- Use the ghettoVCB script to create the backups of the VMs, take snapshots if necessary, copy the backup to the network location, and then purge the snapshots. FANTASTIC piece of script. http://miketrellosblog.arcadecab.com/2010/08/using-ghettovcb-sh-to-backup-esxi-4-1-vms-to-nfs-datastore/
- For scheduling the backup job, you may wish to create a specific backup user on your ESXi machine, or perhaps you’ll need to change the root password to something you’re happier to write in a plain text file. Either way, these will help: http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2008/08/14/esxi-ssh-and-non-root-users/ and http://www.theblueboxes.com/how-modify-root-password-vmware-vsphere-esxesxi-4-vsphere-client
Made my life a whole lot easier.
Scheduling a Windows ASR backup
01 year ago
In Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP, ntbackup’s ASR is a great method of backing up the entire system for disaster recovery. This week I wrote a script to schedule a Windows ASR backup using the command-line ntbackup.exe utility. If you’ve ever written a how-to on VBscript, I probably have read it. Thanks! Of note is the fact that the ASR call for ntbackup is not actually documented, so use this at your own risk, but it’s working very well for me now. Naturally I take no responsibility for anything that happens due to the use of this script, but if it helps, then let me know in the comments. (more…)
The benefits of planning
01 year ago
I just blogged about this over on the Catch The Fire (my employer) Office blog.
Like many SMBs, we spend a lot of our time fighting fires and running from one project to the next. Taking time out to plan for the future is a luxury not often afforded, or not often pursued. I’ll admit also that in the past our organization has had a bad track record for not sticking to plans in the long term. So I was a little reticent about spending weeks of time last year on a 5 Year Plan… but I did it anyway.
Read the full article here: http://blogs.catchthefire.com/office/2010/08/20/the-benefits-of-planning/
Great Plains – invalid pathnames file
02 years ago
In years gone by we’ve used Great Plains Dynamics as our financial software at work. We transitioned off it in 2006, but still have to keep it around for auditing purposes. We had a power failure a little while back, and the machine that GP is running on died, and on reboot Great Plains didn’t work. In my busyness I didn’t really bother with it, until I got a call that we had an audit coming up on some ancient history.
When opening GP, we received the error: “Your path to the data is incorrect. Please enter the location of you Pathnames File.” I took a look around, but couldn’t find any obvious solutions. We were using Pervasive SQL on the backend, which I’m told is really a flat file DB.
I called Microsoft support, but they’ve stopped supporting our version of Great Plains of course. Thankfully, after digging through old records and talking to previous employees, I was able to get in touch with Rimrock Corporation. They’re situated in Toronto and are Great Plains support experts. Evidently they set us up when we first started with Great Plains Dynamics.
So, after just a couple of minutes looking around, their support agent had me set the pathnames file to “C:\Dynamics” which is were the main GP Dynamics install was. After that it prompted for a drive mapping, but it had everything listed that it needed… another OK click, and we were in. Fully functional again… just in time for the audit.
So big thanks to Rimrock Corporation. If you’ve got a problem with Great Plains Dynamics, especially an old version (version 6 in our case), they’ll save your life.
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