UNAMSIL: On The Edge Of Peace - ' Oct' (
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. 29, Eastern Sector Command, Koidu, Sierra Leone">
Oct. 29, Eastern Sector Command, Koidu, Sierra Leone
Arriving at the Koidu base, Majongwe takes the Cisco 3725 and goes to work
in the cramped server room, promising the base administrator the network connection
to the outside world will be down a half-hour at most, while he changes the
router.
Mayordomo is ushered into the office of Lt. Col. Sohail Hamid, commanding
officer for the Pakistani signal battalion assigned to provide communications
support for this U.N. base. Before starting on his list of complaints, Hamid
emphasizes that he and his staff are trying to be self-sufficient. "We will
try to bother you less. And we are bothering you less," he says.
Still, this sector headquarters is responsible for about 4,000 troops at
bases throughout the eastern part of the country and three military-observer
teams with 15 to 20 members each. Hamid tells Mayordomo he needs more-reliable
network services. In addition to the bad router and malfunctioning wireless-network
node, Hamid complains about a backlog of e-mail account requests, lost e-mails
and overall network congestion. Hamid can't provide his superiors with the
quality of communications they expect if he can't rely on the U.N. network.
Mayordomo has his own agenda for this visit, which includes getting unauthorized
computers, users and traffic off the network. Some of the congestion the Pakistanis
are complaining about is of their own making, he says.
The Pakistanis have been connecting a lot of their own computers to the U.N.
network, which is supposed to be against the rules. As a practical matter,
U.N. policy on this point is somewhat conflicted, given that Pakistan's government
is paid to provide the equipment its troops require, from guns to computers,
rather than relying on the U.N. to equip them. Still, the lack of control
concerns Mayordomo. "If, for example, your computer has a virus, you only
need one to take down a network or propagate to other devices," he says. "I
need a list of devices connected to the network, and I'm going to have to
insist that they conform to our networking standards." He doesn't really want
to ban all non-U.N. equipment, he admits, because that would put more pressure
on him to replace it.
To reduce network congestion, there is some phone traffic Mayordomo would
like to get off his network entirely—namely, the "welfare calls" that
U.N. soldiers make to their families back home. He is encouraging Sierratel,
the national phone company, and other carriers to reestablish service to this
region, which would let him tell the soldiers to use the public phone system.
The Pakistanis ought to be able to get better rates than the U.N. itself is
charging. Hamid is interested, as long as access to U.N. phone lines will
remain as a backup.
The Pakistanis also complain about a backlog in requests for IBM Lotus Notes
e-mail accounts. But Mayordomo explains those accounts aren't free. He pays
$35 for each Notes account and the DPKO is already paying IBM $1.2 million
per year. Accounts have been multiplying unnecessarily as military personnel
rotate in and out of the mission, without the old accounts being deleted.
He needs the Pakistanis to provide a list of inactive accounts as soon as
possible, and he wants to move to a system where Notes IDs for the military
will be assigned by function and location rather than by the name of an individual.
If military personnel want individual accounts for personal e-mail, let them
use Yahoo Mail, he says.
But one of Hamid's biggest problems is communicating with a base in Kenema,
another diamond-rich town about 50 miles to the south that has seen its share
of war and violence. Like the other outposts in the region, Kenema is supposed
to coordinate military and military-observer activities with the sector headquarters
in Koidu, but electronic communications between the two has been poor. Personnel
there can send e-mail, but whenever someone from Koidu tries to write them,
the message is delayed or bounces back with an error message.
Mayordomo says he has heard this complaint before. "Remember I told you how
to monitor transmission of e-mail, with a receipt for each stop?" he asks
one of the junior officers in the room. "That would help us see where the
bottleneck is." Maybe messages are being improperly routed to a mail server
at headquarters, he says, but that's guesswork—forwarding the error messages
would let his staff see the address of each server that handled a piece of
mail, which would help them diagnose the problem properly.
The wireless network has also been unreliable, Hamid says, with five of the
14 Aironet boxes used to create the base's wireless local-area network currently
out of commission. Some of the locations that have been without network access,
such as the officers' quarters, aren't critical, but he wants service restored
to an engineering compound and other facilities more critical to the base's
operations.
UNAMSIL has experienced other wireless-networking problems. At headquarters
in Freetown, palm fronds weighted down by rain blocked an Aironet connection
to the heliport. In fact, most of the wireless-networking equipment at headquarters
has been demoted to backup status, except for an access point that serves
an "Internet café" in the stairwell.
And Mayordomo's own staff has complained about the Proxim wireless bridges
he ordered to provide 100-million-bit-a-second wireless connections between
the headquarters buildings. One failed to work during storms, even at short
range and with the power cranked up. Another proved unable to reach a signal
battalion across the bay that should have been well within range.
Mayordomo and Proxim both say the issue must be training, since the same
equipment has been used successfully in other missions. Proxim will get a
chance to repair its reputation on-site when technical staff come to test
a billion-bit-a-second version of its bridges.(See
Dossier) Because he has
never been able to secure a large training budget, Mayordomo encourages vendors
with long-term contracts to bundle training with their products.
But Mayordomo's most immediate problem is the Aironet boxes, wireless bridges
used to connect one location with other wireless nodes. He hitches a ride
to a nearby engineering compound, where he gets his hands on one of the dead
Aironet units. After asking a few questions, he has a good idea of what killed
this one.
The Aironet 350 is designed to run off inline power—electric power delivered
over an Ethernet connection—much like a telephone that can function on
the small amount of current coming over a phone wire. So when a lightning
storm whipped up, the Pakistanis apparently thought the device was safe because
it wasn't plugged into an electrical outlet. But it was probably jolted by
an electrical surge that came over the network connection.
Hamid says his people have been following a directive to unplug equipment
during storms. "Still, the lightning phenomenon is so great that sometimes
we cannot catch it before the damage is done," he says.
Karuppiah uses one of the spare Aironet units he brought to replace the one
that took a lightning jolt. And he is able to get another working again by
using his laptop to reprogram it. But he can't fix everything. He will stay
over in Koidu so that he can visit some of the other team sites in the region
that have reported Aironet problems.
Having equipment burn out is a constant problem. "Bridges, switches and power
supplies are consumables for us," Mayordomo says. "When I was in New York,
I wondered, 'What, are you eating these for lunch?'" This sector office is
the worst because of the intensity of the lightning in the mountains, he says.
He manages this problem by paying Cisco an extra 20% in return for what's
essentially a no-questions-asked replacement policy for equipment that burns
out within three years of purchase. The replacements he gets aren't necessarily
new units, Mayordomo says, "but that's all right—refurbished is good
enough."
Mayordomo says he is looking to see what else he can do about lightning strikes.
Recently, he read about dissipation-array systems from Lightning Eliminators
and Consultants. By discharging charged particles into the air, this technology
is supposed to create an electromagnetic umbrella around an area, diverting
lightning rather than attracting it like a lightning rod. Lightning Eliminators
says Federal Express is using the technology to protect the computer systems
powering its shipping hub in Memphis.
Many electrical engineers, however, dispute the science behind dissipation
arrays, saying there is no proven way to deflect lightning. They believe Lightning
Eliminators customers are protected by the other measures, such as improved
grounding, that the vendor installs at the same time. Lightning Eliminators
argues its critics are simply narrow-minded. Mayordomo figures the technology
is at least worth exploring.
Returning to the base, Mayordomo finds Ambrose Majongwe looking dejected.
"My day has been a total waste of time," he laments.
His sole task had been to replace a Cisco 3800 series router with a 3725
that would handle both data and phone calls. But he hasn't been able to get
the 3725 to work. "On the bench, back at the office, it was working perfectly
well. But it wasn't handling 200, 300 calls an hour then," he says. He keeps
getting an error code indicating "IOS Error," meaning a problem with the Cisco
Internet Operating System. He is able to reestablish an Internet connection
and download another version of IOS from Cisco's Web site. But that one also
crashes, as soon as he reconnects the router to the base's internal network.
He downloads yet another IOS version. That crashes, too. "I'm going to have
to take it back to the workshop and revive it," he says.
Back at mission headquarters in Freetown, one of Majongwe's colleagues is
busy relaying an account of Majongwe's difficulties to Cisco tech support.
Nevertheless, at the end of their stay in Koidu, Majongwe takes two routers
on the helicopter flight back—the one he came with and another malfunctioning
unit that had been sitting on the shelf. And this time they get stowed like
luggage.
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