UNAMSIL: On The Edge Of Peace - ' Oct' (
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. 31, DPKO Headquarters, Freetown, Sierra Leone">
Oct. 31, DPKO Headquarters, Freetown, Sierra Leone
Mayordomo and McKenzie have a Friday-morning meeting with a group of military
officers, a review of how well their communications and information-system
needs are being met.
As Mayordomo is hustling up the steps leading to the Mammy Yoko, someone
asks how his day is going. "Not so good—we're fired up already," he says,
meaning the complaints are rolling in. A network segment is down on the fourth
floor of the Mammy Yoko, and whenever that happens at least 25 people are
affected. He's thinking it has something to do with last night's lightning
storm. It's not until much later that he finds out about a recall of the Cisco
3524 switches the mission uses.
The military officers include Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, a Nigerian and a
Brit. The group works its way down the agenda, noting which problems have
been solved or partly solved. One of the Pakistanis is from Koidu, and he
repeats complaints about the backlog in Lotus Notes IDs and networking failures.
Mayordomo recaps his concern about needing to control the proliferation of
e-mail accounts. The Aironet issues have been fixed, he says, and the problem
router should be replaced today.
McKenzie takes the rap for some recent problems, such as an outbreak of the
MSBlaster computer worm. He's here as the communications representative, but
filled in as I.T. director while Mayordomo was on a recent vacation. "And
I can't spell I.T.," he says, repeating a favorite catchphrase. "When we got
a virus, I ran for the med kit."
Putting on his comms hat, however, McKenzie argues the network is congested
partly because some of the regional sites, including Koidu, are overloading
it. Just as Mayordomo had noted unauthorized computers on the Koidu network,
McKenzie has noticed a proliferation of phones. The Pakistanis must prioritize
which phones really need trunk lines with dedicated connections, he says.
As the meeting is breaking up, the British officer, Lt. Col. Ian McKend,
pulls Mayordomo aside to talk about the unreliability of document sharing
over the network. When the commanders come in at 6:30 a.m., all the military
and military-observer reports from the field that they need to condense into
situation reports for the daily briefing are supposed to be at their fingertips.
But when something goes wrong—for example, when the shared network drive
where those reports are stored is slow or unresponsive—there's no one
around from I.T. to help.
Although the help-desk staff doesn't get in until 7:30, Mayordomo tells him
there's always someone designated to be on call. This is news to McKend, who
scribbles down the pager number saying, "This may be a big part of the solution
right here."
"And let me know if there's any reluctance to come in," Mayordomo tells him.
"If it's, 'Can't it wait?' or 'I'll be there in a couple of hours'—no,
not good enough. They're supposed to come right in."
Mayordomo spends much of the rest of his day trying to finalize plans to
visit Liberia and see how the rapid deployment of technology he arranged for
the new mission there has panned out.
At dusk, when his staff assembles for barbecue and beer on a wooden deck
out by the satellite farm, Mayordomo spots Ambrose Majongwe, just back from
a return engagement in Koidu.
"Ambrose!" he shouts. "Is VoIP working in Koidu?"
Majongwe isn't ready to celebrate just yet, though it was working when he
left. "Let's just wait until Monday, OK?"
It turns out that when Majongwe tried installing several alternate versions
of IOS, he was attempting to solve the wrong problem. The router operating
system crashed because it didn't have memory allocated properly for the hardware
that had been installed, not because it was the wrong operating system.
At last report, the new router was still working in Koidu, handling both
data and phone calls as Internet packets. Yet Mayordomo says network congestion
on the link to Koidu remains a problem—perhaps other traffic has rushed
in to grab whatever bandwidth was freed up.
Cisco's global account manager to the U.N., David Andemicael, says he believes the technicians in Sierra Leone and throughout DPKO need better training to be more successful with Cisco technology. "We're now providing them with a lot of courses we usually charge for," he says.
Majongwe's misadventures with the 3725 router in Koidu prove the point, since he skipped the crucial memory-configuration step, Andemicael says. "It's not trial and error, the way they tend to want to operate."
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