UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA - AFRICAN STUDIES CENTER
Sierra Leone Update

Sierra Leone Update

An Intermail (Fidonet compatible) system is now up and running at IPAM (I believe that stands for Institute for Public Affairs and Management, but am not sure). IPAM is polled (called by telephone for a computer session) from GreenNet in London twice a week (Tues, Thurs), and for now relies on polls from abroad because it has no IDD telephone line.

GreenNet is providing the polling service for two weeks, after which the IPAM Director has pledged to deposit funds with GreenNet for further polling. IPAM is currently considering what to do about cost recovery. I have provided cost estimates to them. There was talk of using MessageTrack (spelling?) for cost monitoring of points, but I now understand that they do not have a copy. I have demonstrated the cost features of RemoteAccess, a bulletin board software, which they are considering. I will provide a shareware version if they request it.

My computer operates as a point off of the IPAM node. I poll IPAM from a private residence in Kortright, the faculty residential community of Fourah Bay College. I am also polled directly from the Baobab in Washington, more or less as a backup at least until the IPAM and other locally managed operations are running smoothly. Bob Barad of the Baobab and I can also experiment more easily with a system that we control, using our results to suggest ideas for local systems.

An additional point is planned for the Library at Fourah Bay College. FrontDoor has been installed there, but they are presently experiencing hardware problems, perhaps associated with the replacement of a single DOS partition with a two-partition combination of DOS and UNIX. If the UNIX partition is maintained (there is talk of deleting it), then I will suggest that UNIX-based communications be explored. There is no staff presently at the Library knowledgeable about UNIX, and my impression is that they've discovered it to be more trouble than it is worth.

The Salstinet Project, with Carnegie and other funding, is planning to link numerous offices on campuses to each other in a Novell-based LAN, using hard wire as well as dial-up. There is discussion of establishing a second node at Fourah Bay College, rather than relying solely on IPAM. Most of the LAN hardware has been purchased. I'm not sure whether they plan to link this LAN to the FrontDoor system at the Library, or to software resident in the UNIX partition at the Library.

I am making shareware copies of Fido software available to anyone who asks for it, and am donating considerable time to pointing out its features and potential. There is a DOS software engineer working with Salstinet, and he and I have been discussing software development to utilize the FDServer features of FrontDoor to make executable files available remotely, the aim being to make reference resources from the Library computer available from within faculty (or anyone else's) offices.

From: cochrane@ac.baobab.com (Jeffrey Cochrane)
Date: 19 Oct 94 07:27:01 
Subject: Sierra Leone Update
Message-ID: <8d5_9410201442@baobab.com>


Editor: Ali B. Ali-Dinar
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