Went down to my parents house for the holidays and had a grand time, but on the first day I learned just how much my parents don’t really know.  I asked my Dad for the password for his wifi router so I could connect to it, but he did not know.  Now this is because Cisco/Linksys implemented Wifi Protected Setup.  My laptop and my wifes both had trouble connecting until I assigned a WPA password.  WPS attempted to make setup easy, but it actually made it harder than it should be.  Anyway, in resolving the solution, I discovered that my parents still had the default password for the router and one of their machines as being logged into only with the Administrator sign on and they had NO PASSWORD on the account!  When I attempted to explain to them how bad that is, they didn’t care.  They said: if it works don’t fix it and it works boy!  Leave it alone!

Now, you Linux people know why these things are bad.  Now I am going to attempt to explain why this is bad in layman terms.  If it works, don’t fix it doesn’t apply here.  Why?  Well not doing anything is just like not doing regular maintenance on your car.  If you don’t change the oil, your car might blow up.  If you don’t patch your router, some mischievous individual may make your computer a slave to his wishes, not yours.  They don’t even have to be in your house or even on your street.  they can be in your neighbors house or on the other side of the world.  This is why you must always do your maintenance.

What maintenance should home users do?  Well here’s what I suggest to do and when:

Monthly

1. Windows, Mac or Linux System Updates.

2. Antiviral or Spyware Updates.

3. Browser updates if you use something other than Internet Explorer or Safari on Mac OS X.

4. Other program updates.

Bi-Monthly

1. Visit your router’s website to see if a firmware update has been released.  If it has, update it.

Every 90 Days

1. Change Passwords.

Now I know what some will say, but these are my suggestions on how to stay safe.  Some of these might be scary for you, but after you’ve done it once, you whoudl feel more comfortable.  The most onerous one is probably the password changes since everything requires a password.  My suggestion isn’t to use an algorithm, but it helps.  If you just can’t seem to remember your password, I highly suggest writing them down if you are a home user.  In a corporate space, this is a nono, but at home you don’t have a choice unless you want to reset your router again.  Besides, if a stranger is in your home, you have a bigger problem than having your password discovered!  If you are afraid to write it down on paper, I suggest using Keepass which is a multi platform password storage program.

This is just an overview of what a every day Joe should do and it not meant to be a comprehensive guide.  If you or your parents aren’t capable of this, then I highly suggest getting them a iPad since it’s very easy to use and hard to mess up.

I was struggling with finishing this book.  Not because it was a hard read, but because God is bringing me and my family to the mat with a lot of things.

Chapter 8

The part that moved me a lot in this chapter was when the mission team was serving patients with HIV.  Would I risk getting pricked with a needle and contracting HIV for the Lord??  Would I go and pray for people who are infected with a deadly disease?  I am starting to believe that I could and I will get to more of that later in the wrap.

Chapter 9

The one year challenge seems easy until you get to number 4.  First, I regularly pray for the world already.  Second, in the last year I have read through the Bible at least once plus I regular read scripture 1-3 times a day.  It’s in my routine.  So I already got that one.  Third, sacrificing my money for a specific purpose.  This is probably one area I need to work on.  While I do faithfully pay the Lord’s tithe (it’s not MY tithe), I don’t always go beyond that.  I need to be better on this one.  Number four and number five can really go together.  Number 4 is changing the context.  That is always a good thing for both yourself and the Lord’s mission.  By doing number 4 faithfully, I believe number 5 will just happen.  You may not be multiplying your community of believers,  but you are multiplying the Lord’s global community.  Even then, what is to say that on your visit to Africa or even down the street won’t result in the that person moving to America and that person coming to your Church??  However have I done well at either??  Probably not.  I know I will do this and hopefully soon, but I have a little more to share that gets back to what I hinted about in my blurb on Chapter 8.

Scared…

While it’s not quite putting my life on the line for the Lord, it kind of feels like it when I tell you what I am about to.  Those who have been reading my blog already know that my son has Asperger’s and for those of you that are new, well now you know.

Asperger’s is a form of Autism and is on the higher end of functioning.  He’s very intelligent, but has issues dealing with people socially.  He’s also quite prone to certain behaviors that include drumming on things, exploding at us when he’s frustrated and obsessing about things.  We’re getting treatment for him, but no drug will completely keep him from doing these things.

I would be lying if I said that it’s easy being a parent of a child with this disability is easy.  It’s not.  It’s very stressful.  To add to all of this, he’s recently been having issues in school to the point where we are not happy with the grades he’s been bringing home.  His teacher keeps telling us he’s doing ok but needs to finish his work faster.  The thing is, he can’t.

My lovely wife is fortunate that she has a at home job, but trying to line up things like services and other things like meeting with his teachers about his education plan take a lot of time.  So much so, that she was just stressed out beyond belief trying to complete her normal work.  She brought up taking a leave of absence….a unpaid leave of absence.  So I do what seems to be the norm for me these days and that was getting on my knees and pray.  After praying, I felt that Lord wanted us to take this as a leap of faith.  Really God?  We have to do this?  Yep.

Now it’s not anywhere near the same as putting my life on the line, but it sure feels like it.  For the next 30-60 days we will lose my wife’s income.  We will have to change some of the things we do.  We’ll have to conserve our money and food.  It will be hard.   The one thing we won’t stop doing is paying the Lord’s tithe.  I know if I continue to faithfully serve the Lord, that he indeed will provide…..but I am so scared!

In the end, I hope that it give my wife the time she needs to destress and maybe….just maybe the Lord will bless us to the point where she doesn’t have to work.  Maybe….just maybe losing this little part of the American Dream will increase our faith, cause us to give more and to grow our families faith in Christ.

Thank you for posting about this read along on Facebook Gabe and Marla thank YOU for organizing it.  I know that you will pray for me and my family and I will for you.  Gee….I think Marla started a community!  Oh and please DO have another read along!  It was great!

The interface is wrote in PHP, primarily and it’s awesome.  You basically only need a web browser and a flash plugin to play music.  It also supports Icecast style streaming so you should also be able to use your favorite desktop player as well.

I would write more, but I would rather talk about it in depth on TLLTS.  So, just go check out Ampache and stay tuned to The Linux Link Tech Show for more.

As I read through these, I had many thoughts.  The first one was how much is enough??  I liked that Platt pointed to the story of the rich man in Matthew 10.  Jesus told this rich guy to sell everything he had and give to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven and then told him to follow him.  Jesus exposed that this man was every attached to his riches and that he must be willing to give them all up to follow him.  Would we be willing to give up our creature comforts??  Would we be willing to go this far?

I don’t consider myself a rich man.  In fact, life is a constant struggle.  Even with the struggles I have, I have more than most people in the world will ever have.  Would I be willing to give up my house, my car, my cellphone, my family….my life?  I struggle with this.  It’s one area of my life that needs to improve.  I need to be more willing to go and lay it all on the line for Christ.

In chapter 7, Platt goes through the seven truths”

1. All people have knowledge of God.
2. All people reject God.
3. All people are guilty before God.
4. All people are condemned for rejecting God.
5. God has made a way of salvation for the lost.
6. People cannot come to God apart from faith in Christ.
7. Christ commands the Church to make the gospel known to all peoples.

I totally agree with Platt in saying the first four are pretty darn depressing.  We all have knowledge of God and yet we reject him?  Sadly yes this is very true.  Even believers aren’t righteous.  In Romans 3:10 it says “There is no one righteous, not even one”.  It’s a sad fact that most people let the world get into the way when they can be good.  They justify what they do by saying things like “well, it’s not illegal!” or “everybody does it”.  Still others do far worse, but even those little things we do that aren’t right count just as much as the murderer in prison.

The wonderful thing here is God has made it possible for us to be forgiven of our sins.  Through his blood and pain, he’s paid it all.  However, we as Christians have a huge responsibility.  We need to go out and share the gospel with everyone.  That’s right.  Do we do this enough?  Are we content to send 4 billion people to hell just because we were too chicken to share a minute of our day with someone who needs to here the gospel?

I, myself, resolve to try and be better about joining Him in serving him and sharing the gospel.  While I can donate to world missions, I would love to go on one sometime in the hopefully near future (will pray about this).   While I am waiting on that answer, I will try and do a better job of this.  When a opportunity to serve the local community comes up, I will volunteer and when it doesn’t, I will try and share the gospel with as many as I can.  God commands it, so I need to do it.

This chapter meant a lot to me, but it just wasn’t as deep as the others have been for me.  I think part of this is because I actually kind of get what Platt is saying.  Why?  Well if you have not read my blog before this or my other posts on geardiary.com or on Linux for Christians one thing that I love to work with (after God and my Family of course) is Linux and Open Source software.  One thing that I noticed once I had become more involved with Linux has been the word community.  Linux itself is a community of Linux users and software developers working towards making a better software.  We hold Linux fests, Install fests and other things in the local community to help “preach the gospel” of Linux and Open Source Software.  In many ways, this is exactly what Platt is talking about and I think it is something that the Linux community have down better than we Christians do because there is no Church of Linux.  There is no building that is dedicated to teaching Linux.  We have no choice but to go into the community and find a place to meet.

At a Linux Fest, there are a number of people that show up to learn about Linux.  Not all of the people speaking have necessarily had training in teaching.  They learned it either themselves or from other people like them and when they learned it, the expanded on what they had learned and then learned enough, over time, to be presenting at a Linux conference.

What happens at a church?  Well most of us show up and expect to be entertained.  We’re good at being, what I like to call, Sunday Christians.  You know the type.  They show up every Sunday and yet you see them doing unchristian like things in the workplace and at the local restaurant.  They are never at a small group meeting and probably never crack their Bible open except in the service on Sunday.  God didn’t want us to be like that at all and yet that’s what a lot of people who proclaim themselves to be Christian do.  Heck I was like that too!  I was one of those Sunday Christians.  Go to church on Sunday and then never open my Bible.  Never study the Bible with people.  That all changed the day after I got up from the alter in tears.  Giving my life to Him.  Did I  get where I was today overnight?  No.  The first step after that was to go to a small group.  This is where disciples are built, in my opinion.  It is where future ministry leaders and pastors can come from.  Without participating in my small group, I would have never had the guts to write a blog post each week about this book.

My small group is a group of men that I would do almost anything for.  I have learned so much with participating in the studies with them.  Our small group is different than most.  We study the Bible, but we don’t sit in a classroom like setting.  We have a group of chairs in a circle.  We usually use a text, but sometimes we don’t.  We also always fellowship with one another and go out to dinner.  These are my guys I like to hang out with not only in the Church but when we go out to dinner  as well.  While our group hasn’t gone out out into the community, it was through this group that I got up the courage (with a lot of prayer time) to volunteer to help other groups out as well.

Two summers ago I had volunteered to help my neighbor have a neighborhood VBS to help preach the gospel to the kids in our community.  I didn’t necessarily do the preaching, but they got to see a guy there.  I was the ONLY guy there and yet I did not feel uncomfortable at all.  To this day if I am at Krogers or somewhere else and see either the parents or one of the kids, they remember me and how I helped them learn more about Jesus.  It may not be quite what Jesus said, but it’s a step in the direction and one I could not have made without God. My favorite example of this was Platt’s experience in New Orleans.

Now comes the next step.  After reading this, I think God does want me to do more in the community and to not be afraid of rejection.  To not be afraid when it doesn’t instantly take hold.  Finally, I need to just listen to him and make sure it’s not about me, but about God.

So one of my next steps should be to not be afraid of the frowns I might get in Church for actually taking notes about what the pastors are sharing.  To not only learn about the Word to learn about it, but to share it with the world so that they may also share it with the world and help multiply the Christian community.  I don’t have to go  the pulpit and preach but I can go into the community and lead a Bible study.  I can go into the community and pray for people.  God wants me to step out of that comfortable chair in the air-conditioned church and share the gospel with the world.  Will it scare me?  Sure it will!  However, if I am doing God’s will, how can I fail?

Update – from Marla’s Post:

1. How are you struggling with “bringing glory to God” in real, tangible ways?

Um…where to start?  I think the best way I can is by being the light of the world.  I mean not being afraid to share the gospel in the places I already am.  If I am not afraid to do it where I am comfortable, the I may feel more comfortable sharing it in other places.

2. What are some ways you already feel God calling you to make disciples?

I’ve had the pleasure of serving as a helper in the children’s ministry recently on Sundays.  It wasn’t me that got me there either.  One sunday morning I got a text from the head of the ministry asking for help and I didn’t even think.  I got on my knees and asked God: Should I do this?   I wasn’t even down there two seconds and God told me go and show these boys how to be a man of God.

3. How could you take steps toward becoming more of a reproducer than a receiver?

Don’t be afraid of the people who are giving you looks while you take notes in church and asking questions.  Studying the Bible with the intent of sharing what you read.

4. Do you find yourself (and your kiddos) isolated from the world in a spiritual safe-deposit box? How can we break open that box?

As my son goes to Public School an will likely continue with this, he is surrounded by unbelievers everyday.  Our family does like to spend time around our church friends, but we spend more time around people who are unchurched than anything.

5. Share something God has done in your life/heart in the past few weeks as you’ve read.

God wants me to step out of my comfort zone and find out what he is doing in different places.  He wants me to help disciple new believers.

The first one I will be working on is the Sansa Fuze+ review.  Will the new version hold up to the old Fuze?  Stay tuned to the Linux Link Tech Show and geardiary.com to find out.

The second is the ZaReason Terra HD Netbook.  In fact, I am typing this post on it now.  So far, I like it!

There will be both audio and text reviews on both of these devices coming to geardiary.com and tllts.org.

1. Bash

Bash or one of it’s variants is usually the default shell that most Linux distribution.  When you open a terminal, chances are it is a bash prompt you are presented with.  Bash is imminently useful for automating tools.  It is how you interact with all the other programs like cron for job scheduling and top for checking your systems performance.  Any good sysadmin should NOT rely only on graphical tools.  You need to learn bash.  End of story.

2. ps, vmstat, iostat and top

I group these together as they are my top commands I use when I am trying to determine why a system is acting weird.  I use ps (usually used like this: ps -ef ) for finding out what is running and killing a process that is out of control.  I use vmstat for checking my memory and iostat for checking io and to get a nice over all picture of what the server is doing now, I use top.  These all work in the command line and all will be helpful in troubleshooting the system you are working on.  Learn how to use them and they can greatly help, but it’s not the ONLY way to look at that information.  I will get to that later.

3. OpenSSH (Secure Shell)

When working remotely or even from my own desk at work, my most commonly executed command is ssh.  Using ssh, I can securely administrate my servers at work as well as at home from almost anywhere in the world.  When working remotely, I am usually also using a VPN to access our network, but I also use ssh as my only tool for getting a shell prompt on my server.  Learn how to use it and it’s sister command scp (secure copy) and you can do a aweful lot of things from almost anywhere in the world.

4. Package Manager – yum, apt, pacman…etc.

Almost every distro has one.  That is a package manager.  This is usually how you update your system for security updates as well as installing other programs.  My favorite is apt and the graphical tools around it like Synaptic since I use Ubuntu and other Debian based distros.   When I am working on a server, it’s all apt but when I am working on my desktop, I will fire up synaptic at least once a day.  Each distro is different so each has their own tool.  If you don’t know how to use one of these, then turn in your geek badge.

5. Cron

Any kind of clean up you do more than once should be scripted out and scheduled.  Cron helps you do this on Linux or any Unix for that matter.  If you don’t do this, then one day your server will run out of disk space and it is usually the day you are on vacation.  Just create the script and have cron handle this for you so you can go back to your life.

6. A Wiki

Do you document what you do?  Well if you don’t you should.  At work we use DocuWiki to write documents on how to do certain things and to document what server has how much ram and more.  If you don’t have a wiki somewhere, then get one setup.  Wiki’s I have used have been DocuWiki, pmWiki, Media Wiki and a nice portable one you can always carry with you that will work almost anywhere is TiddlyWiki.

7. Server Monitoring

In today’s world, uptime is everything.  If your system isn’t up, you need to know about it as soon as possible.  You should use some sort of server monitoring to help you out here.  Tools you can use are Nagios and Zenoss.  I would also include syslog monitoring and web traffic monitoring here as well.  Most of these tools can send a e-mail or a text message to your phone.  At work, we use a combination of tools.  One of those also monitors a website from outside of our network.  If you are relying only on scripts to do this for you, then you need to look at implementing something like this.  The only bad thing here is a lot of these tools can be closed source.  Nothing says you can’t also run Nagios as a backup.

8. Web Browser

A web browser?  An Admin tool?  Sure!  How else do you make sure there’s no errors on that web page you are serving up?  My uses at work are actually more serious then that.  Since we are a IBM Power shop, we have many hardware management consoles.  Access to these are via a web browser.  I can create LPAR profiles and get into the console on these all through a browser.  Needless to say, these servers are NOT connected to the internet.  This is intranet only.

As for which one, I use both Firefox and Chrome (or the pure open source version, Chromium).

9. Backup Tools – tar, rsync and more

Backups are essential.  You WILL loose data and having a second, third or fourth copy of my important server data has saved my bacon more than once.  Tools you can use are tar(original name means Tape Archive) and rsync.  By far, these aren’t the only commands.  They are just the ones I list as that are installed on most distros by default.  At work, we use Tivoli Storage Manager, but at home I don’t have that kind of money so I rsync data between multiple boxes.  For more on this, check out this great blog post on Foogazi.com.

10. A Text Editor – vi or vim

Graphical admin tools are nice if you are a complete idiot or doing something new to you.  They should not be utterly relied on.  So you will need a text editor of some sort.  Be it for editing scripts or checking configuration files, you should learn how to use one.

It’s ok to use gedit, but it’s far better and way more flexible if you just learn how to use a terminal based editor.  My favorite is vim with vi a close second.  They do have a learning curve, but it’s not that bad.  If you think vi isn’t hard enough, then try emacs.  In any case, vim works on every distro known and will work remotely or locally without too much fuss.  I know you can do this with gedit, but you usually have to have a local Xserver to run gedit remotely.  It’s just easier to fire up a terminal session, use ssh and do a vi <filename> to start working on it.

That’s my list and it is only my list.  You may disagree.  If you do, leave a comment and let me know what you like to use.

Based on the purpose of God we’ve seen in Scripture, shouldn’t every Christian’s heart be ultimately consumed with how we can make God’s glory known in all the world?

How can we even do this?  That is a radical faith in God that is needed in order to make His glory known throughout the world or does it?  The more I thought and prayed about this and in the rest of my prayer life, the more I thought each of us can have a impact not just here, but in the rest of the world too.

Imagine this….say God is calling you to minister to children.  What if you, with God’s help of course, helped to show a child the glory of God?  What if you prayed with a child or a teen who fully commits himself to Christ and then God calls him to be a missionary in Uganda or somewhere else in the world.  What is that?  Impact. In your calling and your relationship with God, you helped a child come to Christ!  You did what God wanted you to do and thus showed God’s Glory to the world.

In this modern world, it is even easier to do this.  This read along itself that Marla has been leading is reaching all across the United States and God is enabling us all to be blessed enough to purchase the book and to read and have all we need to share this message on the Internet.  The Internet’s reach is world wide.  We may not be directly feeding someone in another country or showing God’s love directly to someone who really needs it, but we may be helping or ministering from the other side of the world.

So if you think I have I heart for South Columbus, I think that still may be correct however, Columbus is part of the State of Ohio.  Ohio is part of the United States and the United States is part of the world.  The very world that God wants us to show his glory.  So do you have a heart for the world?  Sure you do.  God may just have placed you where he wanted you to be so that you can through all of those degrees of connections you make an impact in his kingdom.  So you can show God’s glory to just a little piece of the world.

With that said though, God definitely calls people to be missionaries in other parts of the world.  That person may be you.  That person may be the one you prayed with 10 years ago.  Think about it.

Sunday morning, I was in my normal routine except I did make a couple changes already.  I had decided to wake up a bit earlier than I did to go for a run.  This was my first run in a long time.  I prayed to God to get me through this radical physical effort that I was about to undergo that morning.  I threw on the headphones with some worship music and fired up the C25K program on my phone.  God got me through the run, but the big change was yet to come.

I was resting after my run and reading a little e-mail whilst sipping away on a cup of coffee.  Church didn’t start for a couple hours yet.  As I was sitting there, my phone received a text message.  It was from the lady who runs the children’s ministry.  She needed help running things that day.   Now, it’s definitely not something that I normally do on a Sunday.  In fact, it’s not something I really ever imagined myself doing.  I was totally unprepared, or at least I felt that way.  So, I did what we all should do and got down on my knees and started to pray.  I asked God if he wanted me to do this?  As I prayed, my mind was flooded with how many times I was asked by her to help and wasn’t able to because of, well, my own selfishness.   I thought, what if I denied myself from serving God?  Would it be going in the right direction?  Would it be what he wanted??  God gave me the answer and said go help her.

So I finished getting dressed, and I went to Church like I normally would and did what I could.  It didn’t take hardly any effort at all and I saw God working on the hearts of these kids!  They need him as much as I do!  One child needed him more.  He was just acting up and used words that aren’t very Christian like.  So the staff basically had him stand next to me and I monitored him the rest of the service.  By the end of sunday school, he was answering the questions that the other adult in the room was asking!  He was actively engaged in the story and was listening.  God was working.

After the service, I was talking with a friend and the senior pastor about the service she helped with last week.  I had come to find out that the children’s pastor may have to leave and he was asking for help.  Now I am not called to lead the sunday school, but at that instant I thought to earlier in the week.  I brought Luke with me to Wednesday night small groups.  There were no kids anywhere to be found.  I came to find out that there was nothing for him to do.  Nothing at all.  Luckily he had his DS with him so he played some games in the corner while my small group had their session.  That should have been the lightbulb I had needed, but no I didn’t see it then.  I thought about it, but then that thought went away.  It took God and that little text message to bring up all of the message that he had been leaving for me all along.  GET INVOLVED with the children’s ministry!  I was denying myself the opportunity to see God at work with these kids.  Heck I even got value out of the story they told that day about David and Goliath.  Boy was I humbled by the whole day!

So, this is what being radical means?  Stepping out of my comfort zone and helping kids learn all about God?  Is it what he wants for me?  I think so, but I am praying and praying and I really want to make sure that this is God’s will.  I want this to be for God and not for me!

I will be talking who I need to talk to.  I want to get involved even if it’s just for my son’s last year in the Children’s ministry.  Even if all I do is lead a children’s group on Wednesday, I want to do something and I don’t want it to satisfy my Pastor or the current children’s pastor.  I want to do it for God!  To do that, I have to lose myself.  I have to be a big kid at times and be willing to bring myself down to their levels.  I have to stop thinking about being cool and worrying about how I look to the other adults and concentrate on these kids who so desperately need Him and need Him as much as I do!

As they were leaving Belize, they got to the airport really early and had over an hour to kill before their flight boarded.  Rob just started crying.  He was so overcome with how God had protected them and of how God used him while he was there.  These people had nothing, but they came to worship God in that church with no air-conditioning and no sound system.  None of the comforts of a church in the United States.  They came and joyfully worshiped the Lord.  They were grateful for these people who came to help them worship the Lord.

You can listen to this wonderful sermon by clicking here.