UNIT 2005

My cousin and I have planned a trip for our youth groups in February to Gatlinberg. He is the youth group of Popular Springs Baptist Church. I am the youth minister of Sugar Creek Baptist Church. Together we are hoping to take around 45 youth ranging from 6th grade to 12th grade. We have titled this years trip “Unit” dubbed after 1 Corinthians 12:12-27. This years trip is going to be centered around growing as a youth group. God creates each person with unique gifts. When everyone unites as a group, they reach their full potential in serving the lord. This retreat is going to last 3 days. We are staying in a 3 story cabin that sleeps 50. There are 14 bedrooms in all. I am going to do part of the speaking and lead worship (song and praise). My cousing is going to be the main speaker. I am looking forward the trip and it is great to see the youth excited about going. It’s also good to see two churches unite since so many churches today act as if they are competing against each other. When are they going to realize that we all “Share in the Lord” as Paul teaches. It’s not about Rivalry, but Goodwill.

IT’s BEEN A LONG TIME

First off, I want to apologize for not putting anything up lately. I have been so busy I can’t see straight. The stats server is coming along. I will give you a quick run down of the Meta:

STAT SERVER:

Linux RedHat9

Apache 2.0.51 MAX

PHP 4.3.9

SAMBA

phpMyAdmin 2.6

Webmin 1.160

VSFTP

This is one sweet server. Not to mention that we can completely administer it from a browser on a remote machine. There is an insane amount of stuff going on. First, I wrote a script that grabs the username, machine name, time & date, lab ID, Login or OUT on a computer. This script was written in VBscript and we applied it to the lab machines with Active Directory. The great thing was that we didn’t have to apply it to an OU of users. I applied it to the OU’s associated with my labs and then enabled the looback option. This allows user options in AD to affect any user setting at the computer. When the script runs, it opens up a text file on a windows share and appends the information to the end of a text file. The Linux server is running SAMBA so we mounted the windows share on the Linux box. We then import the data into MySQL via PHP or a Cron job/Script (haven’t decided) into the MySQL database (Bofe’s decision). We then have a page that grabs the data out of the database and generates graphs real time such as “Total amount of people in the lab right now”, “Total Unique users for the Day/Month/Year”. This list goes on and on. You can pretty much do anything you want with the data. It also provides a nice bit of security knowing that I can figure out who was setting at a machine at any given time and for how long just by searching the MySQL database via phpMyAdmin. We have a few more decisions to make and some bugs to work out, but it appears that the final product is not to far away.

Stats System On the Way

I spent the last week or so building a server with MySQL, Apache, and PHP all on Linux. I chose to use RedHat 9 simply because that is what I had available. I was extremely happy that I was able to do it all through the command prompt, which isn’t too bad given that I haven’t touched Linux in 2 years. The server is going to be my new stat system for the lab. Bofe and I got the idea off a Listserv that we are a part of. Currently, students sign in when they come into the lab and the student workers are responsible for counting the signatures every hour. This process obviously doesn’t generate the greatest results. Not to mention that “Penis” signs in at least 10 times a day. The current idea is to have a login script that uses php. When a student logs in it will let the stats system know that one person is present in the lab. When that individual logs out, it will let the system know that the person left the lab. All this information will be kept in a MySQL database. If all goes well, we will be able to open up a page on the new server that displays the total number of people in the lab (real time). It will have charts displaying traffic statistics over a given period of time. And to make things interesting, we are hopefully going to grab entries from the PHAROS UNIPRINT database (which is MySQL) to calculate total amount of print jobs/pages for the day and so on. From the print statistics we should also be able to determine the amount of money that should be in the change machines, which will help to check the accuracy of the changing system. This server will be a GALM (General Access Lab Manger) dream. Hehehe! If it works. The server is up and running so the easy part is out of the way. I will keep you updated. Who knows, you might be able to visit the page to see if there are any available computers in the lab. Chances are you will just have to take my word for it! I would say that Bofe and I have our work cut out for us on this one, mainly because this is something that we are going to conquer in our spare time (non-existent).