Thursday 23 September 1999

Arrival of Jeffrey Malua (Tuvalu Telecom) and Opetai'a Simati (Tuvalu Government).
Project start: 2 Weeks in Suva, 2 Weeks in Funafuti.

Jeffrey is on his way to Melbourne where he is following a Y2K Exchange upgrade course from Ericsson. We were hoping that he would stay on the project for the next 4 weeks. However it has been arranged thatr a colleague of his will finish the course earlier and help us in Tuvalu for the last 2 weeks of the project.

Recapitulation of the needs of the project.

• IP addresses: attributed by APNIC for the whole country, 16 class C or 16*255 hosts. Tuvalu Telecom however must have agreement from APNIC before leasing any address to customers: second opinion request.
• Domain name: tuvalu.tv reserved with Jason Chapnick after government informed to assist us. TV is one of these domain which have a high commercial value. It needs however to be checked that Jason will establish the requested DNS free of charge.
• Rooms: it appears the the internet room is far away from the exchange room where is the DXC30 digital line. The closest router needs to be in a 10m distance from the DXC30. It is agreed to install the 2 Cisco2511 with modems in the DXC30 rack, while the server will stay in the internet room. The possibility of buying a small Cisco 1060 is abandoned due to budget constraints.
• Phone lines: 20 phone lines will be installed on the rack. We needs to buy RJ11 plugs as Tuvalu Telecom do not have enough.
• Network cabling: Needs to buy UTP CAT 5 cable to link between Internet room and computer room. 40m.
• Equipment: 2 Cisco 2511 IOS 11.3, 1 Compaq Proliant 400 with 3x9GB drive, 1 Array controller (RAID5), Redhat 6.0, 1 HP DDS3 tape, 1 Hub, no modems yet and no UPS yet, suppliers suppliers... It was decided to buy 2 Cisco2511 instead of 2 Cisco2511RJ because of unavailability in Cisco stocks. The procuration of equipment was difficult because Fiji suppliers do not stock or do not have express shipment arrangement from Australia. We decided to buy direct from Australia or to threaten to cancel order to be able to receive equipment in time. The X21 cable for the Cisco will fit the DXC30 cable.
• Money: no funding yet received from APDIP/UNDP despite the 10 day clause in the contract. Is it UNDP or the bank fault...

Friday 24

Training day for Jeffrey and Opet. As Jeffrey is leaving this afternoon to Melbourne, the training is on IP addresses, subnetting and routing. Opet, with Anna Elaise (of SOPAC) did a Cisco course in Kuala Lumpur organised by APDIP. It is therefore important to teach the basics of Internet, ie the Internet Protocol: IP.

From there CiscoConfigMaker? is introduced. It is easy to configure a Cisco Network...

Jeffrey departs for Melbourne at noon...

The 2 Ciscos are unpacked cable connected to the 8 ports hub. Each Cisco is connected to a computer running Hyperterminal. They are powered on, and the default configuration is entered. The Ciscos seems to be short with 2MB of SDRAM only. From the Cisco web site it is affirmed that all Cisco 25xx are supplied with 8MB Flash and 4MB SDRAM. From the supplier via Cisco Australia, they say the Cisco 2511 ships with only 2MB SDRAM and 4MB Flash. Our Cisco2511 came with 2MB SDRAM and 8MB Flash. Try to understand! Fortunately 2 4MB SDRAM modules should arrive in next shipment.

Both Ciscos are in working order, but it is already 17H00 and it is Talanoa Club time. Wanna a beer?

Monday 27

Opet, is doing some NT installation, to know how NT is configured and how it is different from Win 95. It is needed as Tuvalu government is moving toward NT for their network, and it is most likely to be the computer operating system to support on the Internet.

We are starting the installation of the ISP server. The server name is fale.tuvalu.tv. It is not sure yet if we will get management of the domain name tuvalu.tv as the relations between internet.tv, manager of the tv domain and the government of Tuvalu are cloudy.

The server is a Compaq Prolinea with a Compaq Smart Array and 3 Compaq 9GB SCSI drives. There is a HP DAT DDS3 tape unit where we have been obliged to add an external connector to the internal SCSI Compaq Controller to be able to get an external SCSI port. The Smart Array does not allow to have both internal and external devices. We added a Compaq S700 17" monitor and a HP 2100 LaserJet? printer.

To install Linux, get RedHat? 6.0. I don't know why Mandrake does not work with Smart Array.

Put the Compaq Smart Start CD in the computer and boot up. Do a manual installation with a Other OS.

Create the RomPaq? and System when required and after SmartStart? has finished, try to flash the bios of the Server and of the smart Array. Everything is latest. Lucky us.

Put Redhat 6.0 CD in. No need of Linux boot diskette! Boot and Follow RedHat? 6.0 installation. Redhat does not list the Array in the list of SCSI detected but only the Internal SCSCI NCR card. Don't worry it found out the Array. Use Fdisk to partition, disk druid do not understand arrays. Use the following partition:

/boot 100M
/ 4G
Compaq partition
extended
swap 128M
swap 128M
/home 13G

The video card is a ATI Mach64Rage? IIc, with a custom screen that can do 1280*1024 at 60Hz with a refresh rate of 50-90.

Specify default resolution to have several choices in terms of size color (cycle with CTRL+ALT++)

Specify that you want X to start at boot up

Write the lilo stuff in the MBR and reboot. You have a working Linux...

By the way Les Allinson, left for Kiribati where he will install the MNRD Internet network in cooperation with Telecom Kiribati Limited. It seems that they have difficulties in setting up an exchange server to dial and retrieve mail using ETRN with Netscape Messenger 3.5...

Tuesday 28

See what we do with the SOPAC web cam

Opet began the morning with hands-on training on the installation of Windows NT workstations. This included the setting up of the actual workstations, installing the network cards etc., and configuring the workstation to be able to run from a network and locally.

The afternoon began with a series of Linux 6.0 run-throughs mainly using Linux commands.

Wednesday 29

Opet and his best friend Linux (hehehe)

Thursday 30

Opet taking a break with SOPAC IT Assistants, Avinash Prasad and Anthony Browne...and Opet's Linux of course (partly hidden)

Friday 31