Hacktivate

I have been putting this one off, waiting for that exciting moment when I will post via my own working VSAT connection. Unfortunately this has not yet happened. Sadly, but not surprisingly I have been hitting quite a few hurdles. The problem boils down to the fact that I can't make my VSAT antenna lock onto a signal - and I have no idea why.

So allow me to introduce the players.




First off is the dish. Grant Smith, a friend of mine, is letting me borrow a 1.2m Patriot dish that his company uses for a moderately expensive VSAT solution. The dish is was damaged on route from South Africa, but the dents are pretty small. I don't think they are significant enough to mess up my signal - but I am not certain. Notice that the dish includes a reflector and a nosecone.




The next player is the LNB/RFU. I am not sure what these acronymns stand for, not which parts each acronym refers to - but I have been thinking of the sum total as the antenna lately. This is the hardware that captures the radio signal as wel as sends it. This equipment was sent to me by Jeff, and Grant figured out how to mount onto the dish.




Finally we have the modem. The modem is a DirecWay6000, or DW6000 as it is often referred to. This was also sent by Jeff. It connects to the antenna via two coax cables - one for sending and one for receiving. It sets itself up as a DHCP server on 192.168.0.1 and you can telnet into it on port 1953. Setting it up requires a bunch of parameters which have been supplied to my via SatDSL, a company in Czech who will eventually be my ISP if I can ever get this thing working. You also put in your Latitude and Longitude, then the DW6000 tells you which direction to orient your dish, what angle to set it at, as well as a polarization number which requires you to rotate the antenna.

At this point it is just a matter of actually doing the pointing and then trying to maximize the Signal Quality Factor (SQF). And here is where I have been utterly stuck for weeks now. No matter what I do, the SQF is always stuck at 29. No matter where I point the dish it always says 29. The only way I can get the number to change is by unplugging the coax from the antenna, at which point my SQF hovers between 6 and 10. Every day for at least two weeks I would have a new idea, or receive a suggestion from Czech or Grant and I would hook up the whole setup, make my tweak to the hardware or software, then take my laptop outside only to find that I am still stuck at 29. 29! 29 is the bane of my existence.

So what does 29 mean? Well, thanks to Petr Neuman at SatDSL, who has been helping me by sending documentation and patiently answering my questions, it seems that 30 is the magic "locked on" number. Once you reach 30 then you have locked onto a signal and it is just a matter of fine tuning to increase that signal. 29 seems to mean that I am getting signals, but the wrong ones. And since I can point the dish anywhere and still get 29, there seem to be plenty of wrong signals about. And that is pretty much my understanding of unlucky 29.

Last week, Petr sent me an interesting document which has unearthed a new possible problem. Basically there is a piece on the antenna called a waveguide. The waveguide determines whether the hardware is configured to be a vertical receiver and horizontal transmitter or vice versa. The satellite over the US (W1 is its name) uses one configuration, and the satellite over Africa uses the other. Switching configurations requires switching waveguides from the X version to the I version. Here are the two waveguides - I have the one on the left but need the one on the right.




I have also tried running it without the waveguide, as the resulting holes match up into a configuration similar to what happens with the "I" waveguide - but you guessed it - SQF 29.

So I am totally stuck. I am considering trying to machine a new waveguide. Grant offered to let me try an undented dish. SatDSL has offered working hardware at a good price, but it is in Czech and includes a 1.2m dish. Still if I could find a cheap ticket to Europe I could go and pick it up.

I have also asked for help here, but no one has responded despite it being a very active forum. What I need is a Hughes engineer (Hughes makes all of the equipment including the satellite 26,000 miles up) - surely one of you, my millions of readers, is a Hughes Engineer? Or maybe your uncle is, or neighbor. Malawi needs help!

Many people equate hell with places like the DMV (Department of Motor
Vehicles for my non-American readers). You know a place where time is
eternal, everybody thoroughly unhappy, and the staff are rude. Now, how
might you imagine the DMV in Africa? Seriously, think about it before
reading on.

Well first off the DMV in Malawi has a different name - everybody calls
it "Road Traffic". Not hard to spot the negative connotation. It is two
buildings inside a walled compound, with a sort of mechanic's pit
separating the two buildings. People are everywhere, most of whom are
trying to sell car accessories, shoes, and cell phone covers. Walking
into the inquiries office you might see a long queue of people and one
person working - the other 5 employees are buying children's clothes
through the window, eating their lunch or just staring off into space.
From the inquiries room you will be redirected somewhere else, even if
it is just back to the inquiries room. Perhaps you will be directed to
the other building, which means crossing over the testing zone. Every
few minutes an officially dressed person gets into a different car slams
on the gas then hits the brakes skidding through the dirt. Survival of
the test zone will get you into a new room where the employees are
either eating, sleeping, or negotiating a fair price for Nigerian
romance novels. After telling you that your papers are wrong, and you
telling them that they are right, you will be told to return in the
afternoon. Returning in the afternoon will result in apologies and a
promise to type your form into the computer right away. If you were to
watch the data entry process from the window near the mechanic's pit you
would see two people chatting away, one of whom uses a solitary finger
every 5 seconds or so to enter your data. You would decide to leave and
come back. Coming back later you would hear the word "mzungu" (white
person) a lot and then be asked to wait. While waiting you might get a
call from a friend telling you that the South African police are in town
randomly stopping cars and checking to see if they are stolen, as
apparently many cars here are. This might make you nervous. Eventually
the employee would meet you outside near the pit and ask for 5000
kwacha. You would give it, even if you are not sure this is the proper
procedure, and she would disappear returning soon with a registration
printout. You would sigh with relief and drive home hoping to avoid the
South African roadblock.

I just came across two interesting tools worthy of my hipster audience,
so here you go.

FolderSize
FolderSize does something that should have been part of windows from the
start. Have you ever wondered how large a folder is, and then been
annoyed with the right click, properties, then wait while windows
calculates the total size routine? FolderSize fixes this problem by
adding a Folder Size column to the details view of your explorer window.
And because the author thought outside of the box it is fast. I just
installed it today, so I don't have months of use to validate it with,
but so far it just works.

The second tool I am not so sure about. But before I tell you about it,
let me tell you about rsync a tool I am completely sure about. Rsync is
an open source command line tool for synchronizing and copying files. It
sounds boring, but it is actually pretty cool. If you are updating a
file between two computers, it uses some really clever algorithms to
only copy the distances over. This can make a big difference when you
are transferring big files, like a zip file containing many files, where
only a few lines were changed inside one of the zipped files. Even if it
is 100MB in size, rsync will update the old one with lightning
quickness. When you are stuck behind a dialup connection in Africa,
tools like this are critical. This morning I transferred 47MB worth of
code (thanks FolderSize), images and text to a server in London in less
than a minute or two thanks to rsync (and the fact that most of the code
was already there and hadn't changed). Rsync is great but its virtues
are yet to be realized by most users - mostly because people just
haven't heard of it and secondly it is command line based and that
scares people off. Last week I set up rsync to do nightly
synchronizations of about 30GB worth of data for OIBM. This has enabled
a mirroring of account data at each of the branches - saving tons of
daily bandwidth in a place where bandwidth is scarce, if there is any to
be had at all. Setting it up meant, cygwin, cron, ssh and rsync.
Essential parts of any sysadmin's toolkit in my opinion - but not
exactly part of the Microsoft Certified Blah Blah Course. This

is a nice guide to getting rsync going on windows.

The second tool is called SyncToy
and I haven't even downloaded it. On the surface it seems to be like
rsync but with a GUI. Perhaps that is all that it is - and if so then I
that is great. I'm a sucker for efficiency. I am not sure if it can
synchronize individual files by transferring just the changes - but it
certainly can do directories, and it sounds like quite a bit else too.
Try it out - and let me know what you think. I am particularly
interested to hear how it compares with rsync. Perhaps it is something
that I can recommend to sysadmins who are afraid to use their friendly
command line.

I keep a close eye on the blogosphere for anything about Lilongwe or Malawi (thanks to Technorati's Malawi Tag) and there usually isn't much, but every once in a while I find something pretty cool. Yesterday I discovered The Roving Frog a blog by an Australian woman who just moved to Lilongwe a number of weeks ago. Her blogs about life in Malawi definitely hit home.

My favorite blog in Malawi belongs to Katie Greenwood and her
What one does with a Geography Major blog. It is some really excellent writing full of insight, honest stories and a tough look at the injustice faced by Malawians on a daily basis.

Happy reading!

We provide all of our staff about $35 per year to travel back to their villages, and George our gardener has asked for $10 of this money to send home to his family in lieu of going himself. At first I told him no - the money is not just a pot of money to use for whatever - it is specifically set aside so that George can go home and be with his family. Further investigation revealed that George didn't want to go home because his family would expect him to bring so much from the city that he just couldn't afford the trip - even with the whole $35. So in the end we decided it was fine for George to just send money via his brother who is going back this weekend.

I just gave the money to George a few minutes ago and I asked him some more about his village. I have been asking him regularly how his family in the village is and whether or not they have enough food - because their have been warnings for months now. He had always assured me that they were okay - they are smart and grow cassava along with their maize, which is much heartier and more reliable than maize. But this morning it was a different story. This past weekend George met a relative who was visiting from his village and the relative told him many stories about hunger in his village. The people from his village have started going to Mozambique looking for food (refugees from hunger?) - apparently their is a bit more food in Mozambique so the prices are lower, but it is expensive to transport it back. George said that is what he expects his $10 to be used for. He said there are also people that are spending their days in the forest looking for edible roots - he laughed an embarrassed sort of laugh when he said this. Scrounging in the forest is apparently not something that proud farmers do. He told me that his own family is in trouble now too - their cassava didn't grow properly this year.

I asked George if he had ever been in the village when something like this was happening. "Yes, in 1999", he told me. I asked him if he had to spend days without eating, but he told me that he was in school at the time and the government was providing food for all of the students. Even his parents were okay, because the cassava had done okay in the drought. But apparently people around him were not so lucky.

Today, right now, millions of people within a day's, even an hour's drive in any direction are hungry towards starvation.

Everyone has been expecting this, but still this is a very sad and scary bit of reality.

UN warns of Malawi food crisis

LILONGWE - Malawi is facing its worst food crisis in over 10 years, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said today.

This was caused by drought, floods, consecutive poor harvests, endemic poverty and the effects of HIV/AIDS.

More than 4,2 million people, or over 34% of the population, were unable to meet their food needs and maize production was the lowest in a decade.

"Early and above average rains had raised hopes for a good crop, but the rains failed during the critical period from late January to the end of February when the maize crop was pollinating and forming cobs," said Tesfai Ghermazien, FAO emergency coordinator in Malawi.

Exceptionally heavy rains in December and early January caused flooding and crop losses, especially in the southern and central parts of the country.

"We need urgent assistance from the donor community to prevent a further escalation of the crisis and to avert widespread hunger and malnutrition, especially among children under the age of five," Ghermazien said.

Interventions needed include food aid, agricultural inputs, such as seeds and fertilisers, and assistance with crop diversification.

link

According to this article Ethiopia believes in the leapfrog dream.

Ethiopia's IT programme is an extreme example of the aspiration of several African countries to leap out of their quagmire of decaying public services with the help of IT. The dream is to skip an entire generation of infrastructure by going directly to internet technology.

My dream is to bring bandwidth to Malawi especially its villages. By sellingVOIP and relying heavily on Open Source innovations and communities as well as used equipment from Ebay to keep prices low, I am hoping to develop market driven approaches - not just the government gravy trains that are far too common in Africa.