Connectivity Providers Database

From: Neil Robinson <neil@unza.zm> To: Steven Huter <sghuter@psg.com> Date: Sat, 17 Jun 1995 15:53:58 +0000 () Dear Steven, I think it's important to get you some accurate info about our system because I understand that AFRICANA-L has published a couple of false reports about us recently. > I read your January report on the Africana-L and am hoping you can provide > an update of developments since then. At that point, you mentioned > providing "full public service by March 1995." How is that coming along? Well, we did indeed open our doors to fee paying customers at the beginning of March and have grown since then to accommodate near enough 200 accounts and over 300 mailboxes (multiple e-mail addresses on a single computer). We're growing much faster than we had expected and are having to bring forward our plans for technical upgrades to both the line to the Internet and the servers that we are using. > If you have any recent papers or reports that you can make publicly > available, that would be greatly appreciated. Sadly there's not a lot that's been written. We've been too busy just supporting and trying to develop the system, but whatever we make public is now available through our WWW page (www.zamnet.zm) which also has a pointer to our gopher (gopher.zamnet.zm). > technical description of your current system/link and a general overview of > recent developments would be much appreciated. Well we still have a 9600 baud line which we're actually running synchronously at 14400 between ourselves and Internet Africa in Cape Town. Contrary to rumour we do not have a VSAT link operational yet, but are vigorously pursuing this option and hope that it might be reality before the end of the year. Our main problem is in trying to communicate with TELKOM in South Africa who provide such services but don't use e-mail and don't seem to take us (or business) seriously. We're still awaiting a formal quote despite several expensive phone calls from this end. Anyway a 56kbps VSAT connection is certainly what we need and where we're heading. In the meantime we're still using Telebit 8840 Fastblazer modems at either end of the line attached to a Cisco 3000 at our end and a Livingston IRX in Cape Town. Our server, running the mail, www, gopher and DNS is a 486 machine with 8MB RAM running at 40MHz. It has a 400MB hard disk and is running FreeBSD2.0 Quite honestly it is creaking and we have to find a way of upgrading soon, either to a faster, bigger Intel box with more memory still running FreeBSD, or preferably to a SUN or (given our very tight budgets at this early stage of development) to an Intel based machine running a SUNOS lookalike (we're finding FreeBSD frustrating to use when our UNIX/C skills are not well honed, compiled binaries of standard packages such as NNTP are hard to find, and we're very busy with all other aspects of system support). Are you aware of a more suitable operating system to run on such a computer? Is Solaris the answer? Our users dial into a bank of 20 Zyxel 1496 modems attached to a 30 port Livingston Portmaster 2e. That should serve us well for the next six months or so. With 200 accounts we have yet to see more than 7 lines active simultaneously. Most of our users are simply using e-mail, but the Windows package that we distribute includes Netscape 1.1, and a telnet and FTP client in addition to Eudora. It uses Trumpet Winsock as its Windows socket. Mac users have a similar package with again Eudora and Netscape. Our DOS users are using Minuet, although there are very few of them and all are small non-commercial organisations. We still maintain a fidonet system for rural users but are rapidly discovering that given a choice such users would prefer to have interactive access, and that in many towns in the provinces the line quality is adequate to maintain an interactive connection. There are still 100 fidonet users. The fidonet host is no longer connected to the public fidonet network but exchanges mail with our Internet based mail server 5 times a day. Hope that's the information that you were looking for. If you need to know more then please get back to me. Best Wishes, Neil Robinson ZAMNET Communication Systems Ltd neil@zamnet.zm