Macha Works Zambia

This month Macha has a been experimenting with a large VSAT internet connection, connecting the vilage with Committed Information Rates of 256 kb/s downlink and 128 kb/s uplink. The connection can burst traffic up to 2 Mb/s downlink and 512 kb/s uplink. With its succesfully implemented authentication system a information exchange of over one terrabit has been witnessed, coming from over 100 different user accounts.

LinkNet teamed up with specialist Wi-Fi Hotspot Applications Service Provider company PolkaSpots from London, UK, for providing telecommunications carrier grade access and accounting application services to LinkNet. The service provides LinkNet with the facilities to regulate access to its local area networks connected to the Internet in rural Africa. The aim is to roll out this technology across the region in order provide one-stop-shop to all LinkNet customers. The service was switched on today, life in Macha's 'living lab environment'.

At a site for missionairies in Nampula, Northern Mozambique, I found a Content Filtering implementation using DansGuardian (http://dansguardian.org/). The service appeared to be effective, and is implemented in an environment including Chillispot Wireless access management.

The Intranet Review Toolkit provides a comprehensive set of guidelines for assessing the strengths and weaknesses of corporate intranets. It contains a substantial set of heuristics, allowing a detailed intranet review to be conducted that focuses on a wide range of functionality, design and strategy. This can be helpful in design of intranets within LinkNet.

NTOP (www.ntop.org) is a network traffic probe that shows the network usage, similar to what the popular top Unix command does. ntop is based on libpcap.

ntop users can use a a web browser (e.g. netscape) to navigate through ntop (that acts as a web server) traffic information and get a dump of the network status. In the latter case, ntop can be seen as a simple RMON-like agent with an embedded web interface. The use of:

    * a web interface
    * limited configuration and administration via the web interface

Vision Community Radio Macha uses Icecast as service to broadcast the radio signal. A specific server is located in the 19" rack at the radio station. It takes the signal from the studio and brings it to the Icecast server. That one transmits a high quality signal to peers within the Macha network. In the watertower there is an other computer picking up the 'signal' and delivering it to the transmitter.

There is a need to keep track of assets, jobs, queues and the rest. A number of opensource options were looked at, but all failed to just do what it should be doing. The open source options are:

• Request Tracker
• FETA, asset tracking
• Simple Assets

Then wefound ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus from AdventNet at http://manageengine.adventnet.com/products/service-desk/

Jan Nouwen of Erasmus University Rotterdam pointed me at the Sakai Project. This is a community source software development effort to design, build and deploy a new Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) for higher education. Sakai provides an application framework and associated CMS tools and components that are designed to work together.  These components are for course management, and, as an augmentation of the original CMS model, they also support research collaboration.

Today, Dirk Schouten, alerted by Anrik Engelhard from KIT in Amsterdam, send me info about ServerAtSchool, a OSS/GPL Linux specifically for primary education. It is well documented in English. It works with Windows work stations and possibly soon with Linux LTSP work stations. More details on http://serveratschool.net.

Additionally, a OSS/GPL Website Content Management System was developed for primary education: Site@School. It is available in about 18 languages. For further information http://siteatschool.sourceforge.net.

For providing a solution to be able to talk with others at Macha we need Skype. But Skype has a number of issues that need careful consideration. How does one seperate Skype-traffic from other traffic, to make sure that it is given prioirty and bandwidth for the best possible quality? How are we able to route according to traffic.

After some searching we distinguished that actually we have great difficulties in knowing which traffic is Skype. So the approach adopted is to route all traffic that is known and assume the rest to be Skype.

In attachment the descibtion of Skype about how to make a network Skype friendly.