I was contacted by someone working with the YWAM Marine Reach Ship the M/V Pacific Link asking for some help. They will be travelling to remote Papua New Guinea (PNG) later this year, but want to maintain an Internet Connection while there. In remote PNG there is no infrastructure for it, so they were wanting to know what suggestions we might have ...

Here is the original e-mail:

Hello YWAM IT. My name is Brad Holliday, and I am on staff with YWAM UofN Kona. I have been working with the IT team here for the last five years, and I just recently found out about this community. I am very interested in how others are doing IT around the YWAM world.

Right now our team is planning to run an upper level IT school this year. If you have any thoughts about IT training in UofN I would love to hear from you.

Recently Google stopped allowing users to run Windows on their computers at Google. They stated that they were doing it as a safety measure due to the hack by the Chinese in January of some of their system's. That leads to the question, should we consider dropping Windows as well on our systems?

We recently went through the process in the ministry I am working with about whether to continue with our MS Exchange mail service or move to Google. With Google apps you can manage up to 3k users without really paying much. Given our situation, around 2k expecting to jump to 5k in the next 5 years, after crunching the numbers, Google was a far cheaper solution than MS and managing it ourselves or even using their MS Online Exchange service.

Recently a service called Ning decided to shut down their free service. Ning hosts social networks for people and groups. Up until recently they offered a free service and a few different premium services, ranging from $3.00 per month to $50.00 per month. People and groups who have previously been operating networks on the free service are now in a position of either shutting down their network or paying for the service.

Some of the changes that Facebook has made lately to their site has got me thinking a lot about how I use my Facebook account.If you look deeply at the changes made to the privacy settings and terms of service you will see that there is far less actual privacy on Facebook than I think many of us believe.

Recently I was talking with the guys at YWAM Harpenden about options available for digital asset management (DAM). None of the YWAM Centres that I have been at have had a system in place for this, it was pretty much always handled by the media guys just "knowing" what they had, and where it might be. Here's a fun parody video of what it's like to look for this content (I've been there and done that).

At the YWAM Centre I last worked at it was always an interesting conversation when it came to filtering the Internet. On one hand we are blocking the Internet, stopping people from free access and controlling them. On the other hand we are protecting them from all sorts of junk that is out there, and can possibly cause our brothers and sisters to stumble.

This is my fourth attempt writing this post, my computer has crashed all three other times …

I’ll be honest, when we lost all of the old YWAM IT site last year due to hosting / billing problems I became extremely discouraged and lost my motivation. This has resulted in the site you see today, one that is pretty dead and needing a lot of help. The last site started out being driven by myself, but very quickly a community developed, which is what brought life to the old site.

That community is what I would like to build here again.

In the last article we have seen that we can't buy-and-forget a computer, we have to maintain it; and that anomalies, which causes a such maintenance, are (maybe) easier to detect at a car than at a computer. Installing updates is one important part of this maintenance, running a anti-virus and a firewall yet another one. However, if you're responsible for the whole network of your base, it is even more critical.