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UO Members Participate in Network Training Workshop in West Africa
Hervey Allen
hervey@nsrc.org
Last May, the African Network Operators Group (AfNOG) held its second annual
meeting and educational workshop in Accra, Ghana.
A forum for technical coordination and cooperation among African Internet Service
Providers and academic/research network engineers, AfNOG developed during last
year's inaugural training workshop in Cape Town, South Africa. The Network Startup
Resource Center (NSRC), which is based at the UO Computing Center, helped facilitate
its creation.
This year, NSRC and UO Computing Center staff collaborated with several friends
and colleagues from Ghana, Togo, Kenya, Gambia, South Africa, England, and the
Netherlands to organize and teach two technical tracks at the one-week training
session. The 47 workshop participants came from Ghana, Togo, Nigeria, the Democratic
Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Uganda, Niger, Mauritius, Ethiopia, Gambia, Cameroon,
Sudan, Eritrea, and Burundi.
NSRC/UO staff who took part in this year's activities in Ghana included
Hervey Allen, Randy Bush, Steve Huter, and Joel Jaeggli. Other Computing Center
staff members also provided logistical support and assisted in developing the
workshop curriculum.
The workshop sought to achieve three main goals:
The workshop was followed by a day of presentations on a variety of topics,
including how to deploy wireless networking technology and establish local Internet
exchange points. Speakers also discussed IP address issues and gave updates
on the state of the Internet in various countries on the continent.
The events in Ghana concluded with an AfriNIC meeting that was part of the
ongoing process to establish an African IP address registry, a Local Internet
Registries (LIR) Training Course taught by the RIPE Network Coordination Centre,
and a one-day AfTLD forum to discuss issues relevant to African country code
Top Level Domains (ccTLDs).
The Network Computer Systems technical team, led by William Tevie and Ayitey
Bulley, coordinated the setup of the classroom labs and infrastructure for the
workshop and subsequent meetings. Ghana Telecom donated network connectivity
and provisioned dual 128K ISDN lines to give a 256K connection from the Miklin
Hotel to the Internet.
The workshop was split into two separate tracks that were held Monday through
Friday and offered morning, afternoon, and evening sessions. Track 1, which
was aimed at technical staff who already provide TCP/IP-based services to a
growing body of users, focused on the provision of scalable Internet services.
Track 2 participants were engineers who operate wide-area TCP/IP networks with
international and/or multiprovider connectivity. These workshops centered around
configuring and operating large-scale backbones, and covered such topics as
OSPF and BGP routing, as well as how to manage router configurations, design
Network Operations Center facilities, and establish peering and exchange points.
Brian Longwe of Nairobi, Kenya, led Track 2 this year. His goal was to give
the students maximum hands-on experience, and he credited the NSRC and Computing
Center staff with making this possible. "Through the efforts of the NSRC
and UO Computing Center," Brian noted, "it was possible to secure
enough equipment for both tracks as well as the connectivity infrastructure
for the workshop and conferences. Of note was the 802.11 wireless network that
provided coverage throughout the entire hotel, workshop, and conference facility."
One workshop participant, Tewelde Stephanos from Asmara, Eritrea, spoke for
many of his colleagues when he commented that he'd like to see the AfNOG workshops
"occur more than once a year."
Sponsor Support
Many individuals and organizations from all over the world played a part in
the success of this year's workshops. The NSRC, with the support of a National
Science Foundation grant, coordinated numerous in-kind contributions and donor
support from high-tech corporations, publishing houses, and public and private
networks.
All workshop participants received a generous supply of technical reference
books donated by O'Reilly Books, Addison-Wesley, John Wiley & Sons, Cisco
Press, and Prentice Hall. Walnut Creek CDROM provided FreeBSD books and FreeBSD
CDs for everyone.
Cisco Systems provided two routing kits, one of which is on loan to the NSRC,
containing ten routers and two switches, and the main Cisco workshop kit, which
contains twenty routers and five switches. Cisco also provided a generous cash
donation to cover travel costs for some of the participants.
Significant financial support also came from the World Bank's Information for
Development program, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, and
the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation.
This year, more of the instructors at AfNOG 2 were African, and this trend is
expected to continue, as is increasing African collaboration to organize AfNOG
3. NSRC Director Randy Bush, an ally of African networking since he helped South
Africa establish its first link to the Internet in 1988, finds this heartening.
"It is cheering to see the ISPs on the continent stand on their own, especially
considering the massive colonial obstacles, old-think and fear at the PTTs,
and neo technocolonialists," he commented.
For more information about AfNOG and some of the related organizations mentioned
in this article, see:
http://www.afnog.org/ and the workshop pages
at http://www.ws.afnog.org
AfriNIC - http://www.afrinic.org/
AfTLD - http://www.aftld.org/
NSRC - http://www.nsrc.org/