Die Hards are Christmas Movies!

The first three movies in Bruce Willis' Die Hard series take place at Christmas, just like the Home Alone series. People feel comfy identifying the Home Alone series as Christmas movies, but not the Die Hard series! Why? What's wrong with Christmas movies guys love to watch!

MBS Has Job Openings!

We're expanding our team as we grow in our ministry opportunities, and so we have some part-time job openings! Do you know anyone in Southern California that would be a good candidate? Click here to see our current openings!

Please help us! Our growing client base needs us to add to our team!

Gift Recommendation for Your Mac Users

I've been using Apple's Magic Mouse for less than a week and already love it!

I've tried many bluetooh mice over the years, and this is the first I'm willing to trade my wired mouse for! It tracks smoothly and works terrifically!  It's surface is like a notebook touchpad that can read gestures; very nice for scrolling and zooming.

You can get one from the Apple Store for about $69 by clicking here!

Visio Helps Make Sweet IT Documentation!

While working on a project earlier this month we developed this one-page Visio diagram that tells almost everything someone would need to quickly know to get a sense of how the network works!

New Article About IT Policies

Computer technology’s effect on our lives has grown so big and so fast! To keep folks from getting hurt by technology, our government is busy adding laws and regulations, and we need some policies to ensure we’re in compliance. We also need policies to help us get the most reliability and service from our systems!

Click here for a free download of my article on IT Policies in PDF format!

IRS Announces 2010 Standard Mileage Rates for 2010

Today the IRS announced the 2010 optional standard mileage rates in bulletin ir-2009-111.

They are:

• Business Mileage: $ .50
• Medical & Moving Mileage: $ .165
• Charitable Mileage: $ .14

The IRS sets business, medical, and moving mileage reimbursement rates; the charitable mileage reimbursement rate is set by Congress who has not acted to increase the rate for years.

MBS' Major Network Revamp

The Sunday afternoon before Thanksgiving we began a 2.5 day project to completely revamp our network. Though our staff is small, we serve and provide services to church and ministry clients nationwide, so our network needs are much larger than they might be for a company our size.

Here's what we did:

• After shuffling our data off our Dell PowerEdge 2950 servers (one was an ESXi host) we erased their drives and installed VMware vSphere (ESX 4 Enterprise) on both, naming them vh1 and vh2 (virtual hosts 1 and 2).
• We created two RAID5 datastores on vh1, and one on vh2, then created our servers that run as guests on the hosts: 2 domain controllers, 2 terminal servers, a mail server (we upgraded to Exchange 2010), an SQL server, a secure IM server runing OpenFire, a print server, an endpoint security server running Sophos, a WSUS server, and an ftp server our clients use to send us backups of their databases nightly.
  
• We still have three hardware servers (Asterisk VoIP, database which will be converted to our new SQL server, and backup), but will soon have two of those (Asterisk and database) virtualized.
• We started with seven servers on five boxes, and now have fourteen servers soon to be running on just three boxes!
  
• Our servers are all Windows 2008r2 and 2003r2 (due to license counts). Of our two terminal servers: one is 2003r2 and one is 2008r2.
• We upgraded our electrical protection to an APC unit with a network card so we can properly shut down our virtual servers. We have more than an hour of blackout runtime, and we have a generator that can easily power the network for an expended outage.
• Our network also has two Internet connections to entirely different backbones (Verizon FiOS and TimeWarner Cable) to ensure our hosting of SPAM Firewall services remains up at all times.

The best part was that we accomplished all that with less than two hours of downtime to the team, and less than ten minutes of downtime on the SPAM Filtering service! The month before we upgraded all of our desktops and notebooks to Windows 7 Pro and my Mac to Snow Leopard, so it's been a fun couple of months around here!

Cute Resume & Cover Letter!

In these more challenging economic times and high unemployment rates, we all get some interesting resumes! We have an open position for a part-time assistant bookkeeper, and received a cute email and resume yesterday. Reading through the resume I didn't see any bookkeeping experience, so I went back to the cover letter email and enjoyed the cute innocence of what she said.

Hello, my name is Rosie [changed name] and I would like to apply for the Assistant Book Keeper Position. I've always wanted to work in a book store because I think it is a great place for me to work for a few reasons. I love to read and usually spend my free time reading, and since I would be working in a bookstore it would be a quieter environment and I'd actually be able to hear while I'm working. Also I would love to be in a position where I am helping/serving God in a way that I can.

Rosie's cute, and I loved her spirit! You can be sure I sent her a very kind email.