The Steffensens World

I finally worked through the power outages and slow bandwidth to get the site transferred to our new server at GoDaddy.com.  If you’re reading this message, your DNS server has caught up with our address change.  Everyone’s DNS server should be caught up by tomorrow, at the latest.  If you happened to send an e-mail on Sunday or Monday, and we didn’t reply, please send it again.  It may have gotten lost in the DNS shuffle.

SimpleHost, the company that hosts our website and e-mail server, cannot figure out how to process our US credit card with a Tanzania address. I’ve updated the billing info three times now and am finally giving up.

So, I’m moving the site to GoDaddy.com. There won’t be any updates to the site for a few days, and e-mail may be sporadic until the end of the week. It will take a couple of days to set up the site, and then a couple of more days for the DNS records to catch up with the new server location.

All is well here. I’m feeling much better - fully recovered from my malaria. Everyone else is healthy.

Wish me luck on the website transfer…

I am writing this on one of the computers in the Msalato Library computer room. It is one of five thin clients that I finally sucessfully configured to boot over the network from one Edubuntu Linux server. Ahh, the simple things that make a computer geek happy!

The ultimate goal is to get the College off of Microsoft Windows. Almost all of the computers on campus are running Windows 98 because they’re too old to run XP. Also, Microsoft has started their Windows Genuine Advantage program to crack down on pirated versions of XP. If you have a pirated version of XP, Microsoft will not support your computer with security updates. It is very hard to purchase a computer in Tanzania that does not have a pirated copy of XP on it. So, the whole Diocese is going to shift to Linux.

Now I just have to retrain all of the students and staff on how to use Linux and Open Office. They’re both fairly intuitive, if you’re used to using computers; but for many of the students, this is the first time they’ve ever used a computer, so change throws them for a loop. Wish me luck.

Oh, I forgot to mention in my last post that I’m also running two networks in my spare time. At Canon Andrea Mwaka School, we only have about 15 computers, but they’re all all old and take a lot of care and feeding to keep going. At Msalato Theological College, there are about 25 computers with a mix of old and new. Both schools get an internet connection over a wireless connection and at Msalato, we have a wireless mesh setup to distribute the wireless connection throughout the campus. I set up the mesh using Linksys WRT-54G wireless routers and an open-source software package, Freifunk, that replaces the software on the routers. The Freifunk team has about 300 of these routers spanning across Berlin to provide free internet access. Right now we only have 6 of the routers, and I hope to add 6 or 7 more over the next year to improve coverage across the whole campus. I’m also becoming an expert on Ubuntu Linux, because the Diocese is moving away from Microsoft Windows 98 to Linux to get a modern operating system. Even at the cheapest charity license of $30 per copy of Windows, the Diocese cannot afford it.

I’ve created a plugin for TinyMCE that allows you to choose an image from your Gallery2 photo albums by browsing thumbnails.  I moved all of the details here.

I cleaned up the site, moving technical info on the site setup to the “About the Site” page.  I also expanded the “About Us” page.