I’ll just talk about my experiences in this entry, I’ll make another post about how our technical projects have been going.
Last few days have been interesting. I’m writing this right now on Saturday evening (it’ll probably be posted later)-we don’t have Internet at Mike and Hill’s house. Tonse, the local WiMax ISP here has network issues right now. Last night they lost their upstream connection to the Internet. I could still VPN into Tidziwe, using the Tonse connection there. But right now, it looks like they are having problems inside their network too, my traceroute stops at the same point whether the traffic is going to the Internet or to Tidziwe (which is on a different tower from the one we use here).
We also can’t use our Zain cell phones at Mike and Hill’s house. We have a connection to the cell tower though, which makes me think that the cell tower we’re on has lost its connection to the rest of the Zain network. Adding and interesting twist however, my phone worked from the supermarket, but Mike’s Nexus One wouldn’t. Lot of strange connectivity issues going on right now.
I think we’re going to Lake Malawi tomorrow. We’ll probably leave in the morning and then return before dark. Once I got here I realized that I only have two real free weekends here in Malawi. This weekend, and the weekend after next. Next weekend I’ll be in Tanzania. So the weekend after next we might to Mozambique or Zambia or something. I’m hoping I’ll get to see one of the villages in the country at some point while I’m here. It’ll be interesting to compare that to the city.
I’ll start from today. This afternoon we went to a supermarket store here, Chipiku. Then we went to the outdoor market here in Lilongwe. That was an interesting experience, there were tons of people selling fresh fruits and vegetables. A few people were also selling clothes, bootleg movies, etc.
Here are some pictures as we were driving around today:
On Thursday and Friday, Michael and I ate at Tidziwe. A few ladies bring in food that they’ve made. It was interesting to try Malawian food. Much better than the Ethiopian food. Fries are called “chips” here (and potato chips are called crisps). The chips (fries) here are a little different than the ones in the US, they’re wetter and not as crispy. Glass bottles are most common here, though I’ve seen a few plastic bottles for coke and a few cans.
On Thursday I also had a burger from McDouds, a knock-off of McDonalds. The burger was OK, would have been much better without the mildly spicy sauce they put on it. We ordered from the table, and then they brought the food to us. It was about 900 kwacha’s for a burger and “chips”. A lot of places have pictures of the current Malawian President on the wall. Most of the paper currency has a picture of former President Kamuzu on it. The airport, and the central hospital are also named after him. Coins are pretty rare here, they have 20 kwacha bills, which are worth about a dime in US currency. I’ve only seen 10 kwacha coins.
I guess I never actually posted any more details about my flights over here.
While Ethiopian Airlines seems to consistently delay things, the service isn’t all that bad. We had four meals on our 17 hour flight from DC to Addis Ababa. The seat’s were reasonably comfortable. I only got up twice during the flight, but I didn’t actually feel too cramped or sore. The long flight was a lot better than I expected. Got to see dusk and dawn. We took off from DC at a little after 2 PM local time, refueled in Dakar around midnight local time, and then landed in Addis at about 1 PM local time.
Once we arrived in Addis, I had to hand over my passport and wait about three hours for Ethiopian Airlines to give me my hotel voucher and transit visa. Immigration in Addis was quick and painless, it was a pain however carrying all of my luggage by myself. My checked luggage was only checked through to Addis, not all the way to Lilongwe. Some people on the flight from DC had their luggage checked all the way to their final destination (even if they were spending the night in Addis). Not sure why mine was different.
Only got a brief glimpse of Addis. The hotel Ethiopian put me up on was fairly nice. It wasn’t fancy at all, but it had a nice feel to it. Internet was extremely sporadic, we would have it for a few minutes (just in the lobby), then it would go out again. Had dinner at the hotel restaurant, learned that I don’t particularly like Ethiopian food. I tried some Ethiopian bread, along with a little meat, and some other stuff that looked like they were bread-like. The bread had a sour taste to it, I definitely wasn’t a big fan. Had a Pepsi out of a glass bottle, that was kind of cool.
Anyway, I had to wake up at 5 AM the next morning to take the bus to the airport for my 9 o’clock flight. Took about two hours to actually get to my gate after I got to the airport. First, I had to go through security to even get in to the airport building (including x-raying all my bags, even the ones I would check). Then I had to wait in line for a while to check my bags. Next I had to go through immigration to leave the country. Apparently people living in Ethiopia have to get an exit visa from the Ethiopian government to leave the country. I just had to show them my transit visa. Then I was able to go to my gate and once again had to go through security. Finally, they took us to our plane via bus and we boarded with airstairs. It looks like the gates were used mostly by the larger (757 / 767) aircraft. We were on a 737-700. I didn’t have a window seat there, so I couldn’t see quite as much – it would have been interesting to see the rift valley, Nairobi, and have a better view of Lake Malawi. I’ll probably get to see those later though.
In comparison to the flight from DC, the three and a half hour flight from Addis to Lilongwe seemed like a short hop. I was surprised that we were served a meal on this flight too (in addition to a snack). Getting off at Kamuzu airport in Lilongwe was interesting, the airport was pretty tiny compared to Addis. Thankfully all my luggage made it to Lilongwe, which somewhat surprised me. The baggage area at Lilongwe was cramped and crowded with tons of people. They drive on the left side of the road here in Malawi, it’s been a little hard to get use to (as a passenger).
I’ve been in Malawi now since Sunday afternoon. So far I’ve just been in Lilongwe, this weekend we might travel elsewhere. I have a pre-paid mobile phone on the Zain network here. The balance of the account is measured in “units”, a text message is 10 units, I’m not sure about voice calls yet. I’ve been told that 160 units costs about $1. Its interesting, some people here also pre-pay for things like electricity – you pay for a set number of “units”, that correspond to the amount of electricity you are able to use. The local currency, kwacha’s, are exchanged at about 180 kwacha’s for 1 USD. 500 kwacha bills are the most common, resulting in my wallet feeling larger than before
IT-wise, there are a lot of challenges. So far we’ve spent some time looking at a VPN connection that I set up earlier. While the site the user is connecting in from is only a few miles away from the central hospital, the connection still must go through the satellite link because that is the only Internet connection Tidziwe has. This makes their lab application extremely slow, because of the latency and because the VPN traffic has to compete with so much other traffic over the limited satellite connection. It appears to be difficult to do our own wireless point to point connection in this case, because of the landscape not permitting line-of-sight. The remote site, in Area 18* here in Lilongwe, is connected via a new WiMax provider here in Malawi, Tonse. Both Tidziwe and the Area 18 site have line-of-sight to one of the towers that Tonse uses, so we are hoping to get Tidziwe connected to Tonse, to allow Area 18 to have a fast (in terms of latency, because it won’t be using the satellite connection) and relatively high bandwidth (because the traffic will just be traversing Tonse’s internal network, it should provide faster speeds than traffic going across the Internet) connection. Then we can run the VPN software (OpenVPN) to connect in to the internal network in Tidiziwe and allow the lab users to access their application.
For the past several months, the UNC Project has also been using a Barracuda web filtering device to minimize the bandwidth wasted from people browsing to Facebook, YouTube, etc. The servers are on the WAN side of the Barracuda appliance. I need to research to see if this is a recommended best practice or not. Interestingly enough there seems to be some connectivity issues between the end-user desktop/notebooks, and the servers ( as well as the Cisco router). Group policy updates aren’t applying, some clients are having difficulties updating from the Symantec server, and I couldn’t SSH into the router from behind the Barracuda. We’re not sure that its the appliance causing the problem, it could also be something on the Cisco router – the servers and Barracuda are connected to different ports. (Though the two ports are part of a bridged virtual interface / on the same VLAN / etc, so I’m thinking the router shouldn’t be involved in anything other than just doing L2 switching).
Today, we also looked at a multipoint wireless connection that connects several buildings that the UNC Project at the Kamuzu Central Hospital. It was somewhat hard to understand at first – while the connection what previously working, routes were not set up on the main router to allow us to connect to intermediate devices. The access points at the other buildings also appear to be using NAT, which doesn’t make sense – its not necessary at all in this instances, and actually makes the network harder to manage. There are a few other things with the network setup that don’t make sense to me. For instance, before using Tonse, they used another ISP here, that used a site-to-site VPN between Tidziwe and Area 18, but instead of setting up the routes to send all the appropriate traffic through the site-to-site tunnel, they set up a proxy server at the main Tidiziwe site, and set the clients to use that at the remote site. To me, that just seems like an ugly, awkward solution. I’m not sure if I’m just not seeing the rationale for these type of setups yet, or if they truly just don’t make sense
It’s difficult to purchase hardware here, it all has to be shipped in from another country. South Africa is the closest country with a large technology base. There are also some cultural differences in the workplace regarding employees and their managers. I’ve also noticed that people shake hands differently here. Instead of a firm grip and a quick shake up and down, its a much looser grip for longer, without as much movement. I had read that people did this differently across the world, but it’s kind of neat to actually consistently notice it.
Today we discussed an opportunity in Tanzania that may result in a four day trip to Moshi, near Mt. Kilimanjaro, at the end of the month. More details about this will be forthcoming.
*Neighborhoods in Lilongwe are called areas and have a number.
Ethiopian did end up changing their flight to go through Dakar, Senegal instead of Rome. Still not entirely sure why they did this change, as far as I can tell the ash cloud is no effecting Europe at all right now. So because of this, I have to stay a night in Ethiopia before continuing on to Lilongwe.
When I checked in with them here in DC, I learned two things. First, that the flight is even later than the time that they rescheduled it to. I now leave at 1:30 PM. Second, apparently my carry-on that was perfectly fine for my United regional jet flight is too heavy for them and has to be checked.
Not overly impressed with Ethiopian so far. While they did give me a $7 lunch voucher to use here in Dulles, the fact that they changed the flight to begin with, the fact that the flight is further delayed, and that they have a pretty limited carry-on policy isn’t giving me too good of impression so far.
I’ll try to add some pictures of Dulles to this post in a bit. They have really interesting elevated bus type things to take people from one terminal to another.
Now for the promised explanation of what I’ll be doing over in Africa. My friend Michael works for UNC at the Tidziwe hospital in Malawi. They currently are using AtMail for their mail services – Michael and I helped set this up after they bought it about a year ago. I’ll hopefully be setting up an Exchange 2010 server to act as a pilot to see if they want to deploy it further.
They also want to use Windows Sharepoint Services (Sharepoint Foundation in the 2010 version) for internal collaboration and document sharing. I’ll help them install and configure this as well. The 2010 version was just released, I haven’t had a chance to play around with it yet. The hardware requirements on the server end might make it somewhat more difficult for them to deploy though. I’m thinking I’ll probably recommend using Windows Sharepoint Services 3, which is more more established.
The UNC project in Malawi is also in need of having a solid backup system put into place. I’m going to evaluate the applications and data they use and help them implement a basic system to backup their data in case of problems. One issue that appears to be fairly common there is a loss of electricity. Lastly, I might help segment their network into VLAN’s to give them a little bit better control over the traffic flowing through their limited Internet connection. They already have a Barracuda web filtering device that the purchased last year, so this will help enhance the power of their filtering appliance.
Now, I’m also hoping to work on a few other projects that I think could benefit them.
They have been trying to establish site to site links between satellite clinics around Lilongwe and the main facility. Some of these links were point-to-point wifi solutions, and some of them are thought to be more appropriate for a site to site VPN. Both of those topics interest me, and I’m hoping I’ll be able to get the sites connected together.
A network access control system could also benefit them, though the hassle may outweigh the benefit. It sounds as if they have problems with a lot of people bringing unauthorized and/or insecure devices on to the network. A NAC system can help to keep those users off the network, or at least on a different VLAN.
So there’s the major things I want to focus on in Malawi. Also, I’ll probably be spending a few days in Moshi, Tanzania. It’s a Duke University medical clinic near Mt. Kilimanjaro that has to switch satellite ISP’s in the next month. Michael and I are planning on traveling there to assist them with the transition, and to provide additional network advice and suggestions in the future. It’ll probably be around the end of the month – May 29 – June 1, but I’m not 100% sure yet.
It’s hard to believe that I’ll be halfway around the world three days from now. I’ll be leaving for Malawi bright and early this Friday, via Ethiopia.
Here’s what my trip will look like according to a cool mapping tool on www.gcmap.com. It’ll take a little bit over 24 hours to make it from here to there. If the ash cloud keeps blocking Italian airspace then I might be rerouted through Dakar, Senegal instead of Rome on my way to Ethiopia. Either way I’m going to be on a plane (Ethiopia Airlines flight 503, a Boeing 767-300) for about 16 hours. At least I should have a window seat. Anyone have tips on handling long flights?
I’m a little nervous about catching my connecting flight in Ethiopia, I only have a little over an hour. (On a side note, saying “Addis Ababa” is kind of fun and makes me smile). This is my first time flying internationally, so it’ll be a new experience. After leaving Ethiopia my flight will stop in Lubumbashi, Congo before continuing on to Lilongwe, Malawi. (Another side note, no I’m not quite sure how Lubumbashi is pronounced). I’ll be great to see my friends Michael and Hillary again.
I’ll be working on several technology related projects there that should meet a requirement for my major at IUPUI. I’ll post some details about what I’ll be doing there in the next couple days when I have a chance.
