Tech Geek

I've commented a few times about wanting to talk about OpenID. This is not a new federal identification system that will allow us to get on airplanes without standing in line. It is a system that will hopefully slow down the accumulation of IDs and passwords that all of use have to various websites.

OpenID provides a method for using one username on a variety of websites. It is free and allows for access to almost ten-thousand different websites. It is an intentionally open source concept that does not charge for users or providers.

So how do you take advantage of it? First, you have to establish an online presence using any one of the following sites. If you have an account, and therefore awebpage, with one of these providers, you already have an OpenID. The list is from OpenID.net, at the How do I get an OpenID page.

AOL

openid.aol.com/screenname

Blogger

blogname.blogspot.com

Flickr

www.flickr.com/photos/username

LiveDoor

profile.livedoor.com/username

LiveJournal

username.livejournal.com

Orange (France Telecom)

http://openid.orange.fr/

SmugMug

username.smugmug.com

Technorati

technorati.com/people/technorati/username

Vox

member.vox.com

Yahoo

http://openid.yahoo.com

WordPress.com

username.wordpress.com

I have been using my blogger site as my OpenID for a few months now. Even if you don't update your blog, you can still use it as an OpenID. I'll take you through the process I used to login to MyMileMarker.com, a site that I'm using to track my cares gas mileage.

1. Visit the website, mymilemarker.com .
2. Click the Login with OpenID >>  link
3. Enter pastorandy.blogspot.com into the hard-to-see, black-on-black, box.
4. Click the Login >> button.
5. Now, some magic happens, and I am asked by Blogger to login to my account. This is actually a Google Account, since Google bought Blogger, but I verify in the toolbar that it is Blogger/Google asking for my information.
6. I fill this in and then some more magic happens (there is the passing of a bit of cyber-information) and I'm logged into MyMileMarker.com.

There are at least two advantages to this system. First, I don't need to remember yet another username and password for the new website. Second, if I'm already logged in to Blogger, I don't have to re-enter my username and password a second time. As the number of websites using this system increase it will continue to become a more and more viable alternative to collecting dozens ofusernames and passwords.

Whenever you go to a new website, look for the OpenID Logo and click on that to use your OpenID to create an account on that site.

Domain Name Resolution is probably not a topic many of you have put much thought into. It is one of the many "behind-the-scenes" things that happens while you use the internet. A Domain Name System (DNS ) Server takes a web address that you type into your system and converts it into an Internet Protocol (IP ) address. You can think of DNS as a giant phone book that converts names to numbers. For example, The ELCA Youth Ministry Network's website, www.elcaymnet.org, is actually found at IP Address 204.188.103.6. Most of us just use the DNS Servers provided by our Internet Service Provider. These generally work fairly well and require no configuration. Today I want to share a different tool which I switched to a year or so ago, OpenDNS, which does all that and more, for free!

OpenDNS (http://www.opendns.com/ ) is a free service that handles all the regular DNS chores and also adds some great extra features. In general, I'd say the extra features aren't perfect, but they're sure better than nothing (which is what I'd imagine many of us are doing). Many churches run small office networks. You may or may not allow people to use either computers on the network or connect via Wi-Fi to the network. What happens if they try and go somewhere, shall we say, less than ideal? If you're not running any sort of filtering software, they get the site to come up without any problem. If you're using OpenDNS, they get a page, which you can customize, saying something like "Site Blocked. This site is not allowed by Northridge Lutheran Church on this network. Site categorized as nudity."

Let's say you get a very convincing e-mail that appears to be from your bank. You click on a link and are taken to a phishing site, one which is trying to harvest your personal information to take your money. It looks just like your regular bank website and you don't notice that the address is different, so you type in your login information. Now they have your information and can steal your money and maybe even your identity. But if you were using OpenDNS, the site would have failed to come up and given an error page similar to the Blocked Page above.

Another feature fixes those stupid errors your keyboard makes when you have your fingers on the wrong keys. You, and anyone around you, knows that you meant .com, even though you only typed .cm. OpenDNS will fix this for you, and take you to the .com that you wanted to go to in the first place.

It's all customizable, once you sign up for a free account, and set up your router to use the OpenDNS servers instead of the ones from your ISP. The computers on the network will automatically use them, if the router is configured that way. Visit https://www.opendns.com/start to get started for yourself. The complete list of features is available at https://www.opendns.com/features/ .

P.S. This is all much easier if you have a static IP address. If you have a dynamic IP address, as many ISPs provide, you'll need to follow some extra steps, laid out by the OpenDNS folks at their site (http://www.opendns.com/support/dynamic_ip/ ). Basically, you'll need to run a small program that tells OpenDNS whenever your IP address changes, so they can provide the blocking services described above.

This week I'll try to shed some light on another user-submitted question: What's the easiest (maybe cheapest) way to get wi-fi into the further parts of our building? With concrete walls and steel infrastructure, the LinkSys wireless-G 2.4 GHz system never worked even between our offices which are all in a row on one side of a hallway. So we went to hard-wiring. I'd love it if I could use my laptop in the youth room which is in the basement of another wing of the building -- but even better would be if anyone could use their laptops in whatever part of the building we were in.

Wireless networking is one of my favorite additions to the world of technology. We all are happy to have fewer cords, cables, and wires in our lives. We're even happier when they really do what we want them to, which can be a challenge!

I want to start with a couple of assumptions. I write these posts assuming that you don't have an Information Technology department at your beck and call. I also write from the standpoint of someone who wants to get a good value solution, maybe not the cheapest, but certainly frugal. Finally, there is an art to getting these things to work and there probably isn't one right answer, but I'll take a stab at passing along some information that I hope is helpful. If you want to have an excellent wireless network and money is no object, consult a company which installs networks and will use commercial enterprise-grade equipment. They will set something up that will work extremely well. It will also probably be extremely expensive.

At the same time, you do get what you pay for. Buying the cheapest available wireless router will get you a piece of equipment that does not perform as well as something that was not $9.95 after rebate. I have bought lots of these cheap blue boxes and they generally work alright, for awhile, but then they fail. This give me an excuse to go out and buy newer technology, but it can also be inconvenient. As with just about all technology, price continues to drop while features increase.

In researching some options, I came across this page (http://wirelessinfo-r-us.blogspot.com/2007/11/basic-service-set-bss-vs-extended.html) which provides a good overview of how to use multiple wireless Access Points (APs) in order to provide broad coverage. The assumption is, however, that these APs will be connected via a wire to the network. By using the same ESSID, you will be able to roam throughout the building and maintain coverage because you are always in the reach of a radio signal. Each AP needs to be set on a different channels, but use the same SSID. The wireless security needs to be the same on each AP as well.

This is the solution recommended by my friend at Pacific Lutheran University, David Allen: do wired whenever you have a fixed office (Pastor, Secretary, etc.) and supplement that connection with wireless for mobility in meeting rooms, visitor areas (even visitors in the fixed offices), but unless you're willing to invest time and money it's generally cheaper to use the cables than the wireless for your average building/installation area.

It is also possible to add stronger antennas to a wireless router or AP so that the signal reaches farther. I have experimented with this myself, however, and I was not particularly impressed with the results, especially considering that the antennas were quite expensive. Compared to pulling network cables through the wall, it might be worth a try.

I spent much of the week scratching my head as to how to get the signal down to that youth room in the basement of another wing of the building without drilling holes in the wall to run new wires. Then it finally hit me, don't run new wires, use ones that are already there. It may not work in some church buildings because of the way churches tend to be built in phases, but it may also be worth a try. Use your existing power lines to carry the signal from one area to another. It's called powerline networking and all the networking gear manufacturers carry some equipment that will help you to do it. C|Net.com has an article in their Do-It-Yourself section entitled Set Up a power-line network. You can go to cnet.com and enter powerline into the Search Box to find more information. They will also give you a list of current products from a variety of vendors. Another option, which I'm not going to go into in depth, would be to use the existing phone lines (www.homepna.org) to carry the data.

P.S. - I hope to see you at the Extravaganza!net

I received this question from an ELCA Youth Ministry Network Member in Kansas: What's the easiest way to do backups that will be stored offsite? We aren't doing any! (arrgh!)

Kudos for realizing that you should be doing backups! So should I and so should everyone else. I do backup some things, but I am not as attentive to it as I should be. This was a challenging question for me because I haven't paid as much attention to is as I should. So I am not able to make one good recommendation, but I will point out a couple of options. My current backup practice is redundancy. I keep things on my UFDs (see last week's post), on multiple computers at the office, and on a variety of online places. What else could I do? What else could you do?

I don't backup my e-mail because I don't have to. As you may guess from my earlier posts, I use a Google Mail (www.gmail.com) account which currently gives me 6355.160193 (and counting) megabytes of storage for me e-mails and attachments. I'm only using about 5% of that space at the moment! All Google services are hosted on their servers and they redundantly back them up and keep them secure.

On my computer, I try and store everything that I might want back under a single folder. Windows makes this easy by providing the My Documents folder. If I use another program that wants to store its data somewhere else, I change the folder to be a sub-folder of My Documents. That way I know that copying that folder to another machines provides some level of backup. I routinely copy my laptop My Documents folder to a shared folder on our network.

You can use the built-in services that your operating system provides. Windows Vista Ultimate, which I am running, has a backup service built in, as do most other operating systems. You could use one of these to copy your data to a portable hard drive, or to another machine on your network. As one example, Amazon.com is selling a SimpleTech SimpleDrive that has 500GB of capacity for only $129.99. I would think that most church offices could copy all of their machines to a drive of that size. Then, of course, the drive needs to be carried elsewhere so that if the church burns down, the data isn't lost with it! And, of course, you need to remember to bring it back in and re-do it every week or so. If you are going to go with a physical backup system, this is probably the way to go. Otherwise you could find yourself going nuts with backup CDs and DVDs stacked to the ceiling.

There are also a variety of online options available. I am not going to try and list all of them here and I have not used most of them. They range from free to quite expensive in price. One of the currenlty free ones, Microsoft FolderShare (www.foldershare.com), allows you to synchronize files between multiple machines. If you set this up between a home desktop and an office desktop, that will keep your files in two places. Good backup security requires a third location as well, so ideally you would find a third machine to synchronize with as well.

• These services provide automatic backup of data from one PC
  • Carbonite (www.carbonite.com) unlimited storage for $49.95/year
  • iDrive (www.idrive.com) 2GB of storage for free; 50GB for $49.95/year
  • Mozy Online Backup (mozy.com) 2GB of storage for free; unlimited for $4.95/month
    
• These services provide space, but you must manually copy files to the service, often using a separate program. They generally allow sharing directly from the internet as well.
  
  • ADrive (www.adrive.com) 50GB for free
    
  • MyOtherDrive (www.myotherdrive.com) 5GB for free; 25GB for $19.99/year; 75GB for $49.99/year; 200GB for $99.99/year
  • XDrive (www.xdrive.com) 5GB for free
  • OmniDrive (www.omnidrive.com) 1GB for free; 10GB for $40/year; 25GB for $99/year; 50GB for $199/year

The time that most of us think about the ineffectiveness of our backup "solution" is about 45 seconds after we realize that our hard drive has crashed or the sprinkler system has ruined our computer and we don't have any of what we've spent years putting together. Planning ahead can make these sorts of tragedies a little less traumatizing.