AfNOG @ Nairobi

Weather: comfortable, high teens to low twenties celsius. Warmer when the sun comes out, which is rarely. Thunder and rain. Nairobi is only a little way south of the equator but it's nearly 1700m up, hence the somewhat temperate climate.

The hotel is quite civilized, with a nice restaurant and good coffee :-)

This morning we had meetings to decide the curricula, which get adjusted from year to year as the Internet and its software evolves. There are now four tracks: F2 is the French routing track, E2 is the English routing track, E1 is the services track (which I am helping with), and E0 is the Unix basics track. (E0 was introduced last year because many students did not have the background knowledge necessary for E1 and E2.)

E1 is roughly as follows. First 1.5 days of DNS then 0.5 days of web stuff. This year we are ditching Squid in favour of more about authentication, specifically RADIUS. Then 1 day of SMTP (Exim, presented by me) and 1 day of POP&IMAP. Finally half a day to consolidate the security stuff that has been done in the course of the previous subjects - SSL certificates and so forth.

I am going to have to adjust Philip Hazel's teaching materials so that we can do SMTP AUTH backed with RADIUS. This should be nice and easy, since FreeBSD (our Unix of choice) comes with the libradius client library, which Exim supports.

AfNOG pictures

Our "localhost" spent most of today struggling to get shipments through customs, including the routers for {E,F}2 and various other equipment. Most of the instructors are here now, and we are very international crowd. USA, Canada, Ausralia, New Zealand, Chile, France, Denmark, Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, and I'm sure I've forgotten some. A few people represent several countries by themselves :-)

http://www.ws.afnog.org/pictures/index.html

Amanda's pictures from today (4th May) include one of Y.T. editing slides and handouts.

The Guinness brewed under licence in Kenya is 6.5%. The coffee is still excellent.

Kooks

I note that the prolifically incompetent "mathematician" Eugene Terrell has recently submitted a couple of new Inernet-Drafts on the topic of being able to fit more than 128 bits of numbers into 32 bits of space. Go to http://www.watersprings.org/pub/id/index-t.html and look at draft-terrell-* ...