Day 53 - FOSS Seminar

The bulk of my day was spent preparing for and giving a faculty development workshop on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). I mentioned in a previous blog that I've become the local FOSS evangelist. The CompSci instructors were very interested and interactive at this afternoon's session. I enjoyed it, and hopefully cleared up some myths and sowed some seeds of conversion. It is heavily frowned upon (and perhaps illegal) to proselytize here since it is officially an Islamic republic, but I think that only applies to religion and not software origins. At least I hope so.

Another spur of the moment project came up just before lunch. It seems the soldiers working in the main gate guard building don't have any network connection and would really like to access the internet. It all started when one of the local Afghan soldiers came to us with a translator asking for some spare networking parts. Rather than just cough up whatever hardware they ask for, we've learned to dig into the problem a bit and try and figure out what they are trying to accomplish. It's a good thing we did this time. They had it in their head that all they needed was to pull a network cable through the manholes from a nearby building and the internet would be theirs. We politely said "show us what you're doing."

With a bit of disdain that we didn't just hand over hardware, they walked us around and showed us the project. We spent some time tracing cables, opening up wire boxes and examining manhole covers. After about 15 minutes of searching, I located a newly installed 16 pair cable and punch down blocks with only two pair in use for the two building phones. I explained to them a reasonable solution for extending the network from the adjacent building to this one and they seemed happy for the help at last.

Then we walked over to the adjacent building which happened to be one of the three dormitories. It turns out the network has been down in that building for over a year. Really. After some more detective work we discovered that the main switch and fiber termination had been "vandalized" (broken open, fiber ends pulled off, stale bread left in the cabinet, etc.). The project started to grow. After a bit more time we located a hastily installed temporary network cobbled together with a few home switches, and no confirmation of external access. We talked them through a fix for this as well and reminded them that all the new fiber and networking equipment (that was torn apart) had only been installed two years earlier (with an accompanying US taxpayer bill consisting of seven figures).

There's no hope really of trying to reconstruct the demise of the previously installed network. Instead, we laid out a high level plan and course of action and left it to them to make right. Of course we offered as much help as possible, but no more money or equipment (for now). I guess this is a bit like "tough love." We provided a working solution in the past, but didn't teach them how to take care of it well enough, or they didn't value it enough to take care of it since it came too easily. They've been without for a while now, and they will continue to be until they figure out a way to fix things. Hmmm. I guess there's a much larger lesson in this whole experience. I hope at least some of our Afghan colleagues that took part in the trouble shooting today realize it.