A Real Life Tower Defense Game

Have you ever played a tower defense video game?  They're fun little strategy games that involve setting up a system of guard towers to defend against oncoming waves of attackers.  The proper placement of the right types of towers will keep your fortress safe, but if you don't plan well the attackers will overrun you!

Well, protecting computers and networks is a lot like a real life tower defense game!  One of my roles with DiscipleMakers is to protect the computers, data and networks at the headquarters from the attackers (most of which are automated and fairly mindless just like in the games!) seeking to steal our data and use our systems for bad stuff.  If we don't take adequate measures, confidential data could be compromised and the reputation of DiscipleMakers (and by extension, the Lord) could be damaged.  I don't want to see that happen.  Do we need to trust the Lord to protect us?  Definitely!  Has he given us counter-measures that we should use against computer attackers?  Absolutely!

Recently I completed a project to improve our Internet Gateway which handles firewalling and other network services and protections.  It's our main "defense tower" and now it has significantly newer software and hardware than our previous setup.  It's also running Ubuntu Linux which will make it much easier to keep the software up to date and secure than our previous Debian "testing" setup.  Praise God for many smart people who have written great free software that we can use to advance His Kingdom!

During this project God taught me some key lessons and grew my character.  I learned a lot about the importance of communication with other people about the status of the project.  I also learned about how to submit when decisions were made to do things in ways other than what I would have chosen.  At the end it was really encouraging to rollout the new system and see it work and rest easier that night knowing that our tower had just been upgraded with the super bazookas.  :)