ACKNOWLEDGEMENT & INTRODUCTION
First of all I would like to convey my sincere thank you to Don Hollander, Pacific
Internet Partnership coordinator for the assistance in securing sponsorship for my
trip to the conference and the Reserve Bank of Vanuatu for co-funding with traveling
allowances.
I am pleased to submit this report on the 6th Pacific Islands Chapter of Internet
Society conference that was held in Honiara on the 14th to 24th August 2007.
This is a submission to the Pacific Internet Partners (www.pip.org.nz) for sponsoring
me to this conference as part of their travel fellowship assistance.
Due to the tight schedule of the international flights to Honiara from Port Vila, I was
able to arrive at the conference on Wednesday, 15th of August 2007 with the other
Vanuatu participants and started attending the conference on Thursday 16th of
August 2007. We had a very good participation from the Vanuatu participants of
whom some of them are being sponsored by the Pacific Internet Partners.
PaciNET 2007
PaciNET 2007 is the 6th annual conference and AGM of PICISOC with the theme,
“National ICT Strategy Building” hosted at the Forum Fisheries Agency (FFA) in
Honiara, Solomon Islands with participation from all over the Pacific region. The
conference is designed to address all technical and non-technical issues affecting ICT
in the Pacific Region with a very high profile with participation from the national,
regional and the international community. The conference is composed of several
types of contribution from different presenters including paper presentations,
demonstrations, tutorials and workshops and panel discussions.
Coming from a technical background, I have drawn my full attention to attending
tutorials and workshops during the whole conference and sitting in a few
presentations especially the most highlighted One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Oceania
initiative.
I am very impressed about the organization of the conference and I must say
PaciNET has fully grown to one of the biggest regional technical conferences
compared to when Vanuatu hosted in Port Vila back in 2004. It has really shaped ICT
development in the Pacific Region. A good outcome of the conference that was held
in Port Vila resulted in Vanuatu creating its own Vanuatu IT Users Society (VITUS)
that all ICT Users subscribe to a mailing list to share information and help each other
technically. I find this local mailing list very useful as you get to know other people
with the same interests.
The announcement made by the Director of the Secretariat of the Pacific Community
(SPC), Dr Jimmy Rogers during the conference about the Rural Internet Connectivity
System (RICS) and South Pacific Islands Network (SPIN) is another step going
forward for the South Pacific Community.
At the end of the conference, Cook Islands and Papua New Guinea (PNG) both
presented some very excellent bids to host PaciNET 2008 and was credited to Cook
Islands through a very tight vote from PICISOC members.
WHAT I LEARNT
I have learnt a lot from the Workshops and Tutorials during the conference. Here are
some of them:
IPv6
The first day at the conference was a very good IPv6 Tutorial by the APNIC training
team that I get to know more about this new version of the Internet Protocol. This is
the first time I get to introduced myself with IPv6 and the hands-on for configuring
hosts. The tutorial was very technical as we also tried to calculate number of ip
addresses in a particular subnet class.
Spam Tutorial
As a system administrator at the Reserve Bank of Vanuatu, I am responsible for the
security of our mail servers and was very fortunate to have attended this tutorial
again tutored by the APNIC training team. In general they have identified the best
current practices on spam prevention that I found most of them very useful I will
apply some of them at the workplace.
Information Security Workshop
Chris Hammond-Thrasher, USP Library Systems Manager, who is the presenter of
this workshop, is a very interesting person to listen to with all these stories about
hackers hacking into systems with most of his illustrations to be of real security
incidents that he had directly or indirectly involved with. The workshop outlines the
main issue of information security, what a security personnel needs to know and
even go as far as recommending some of the top 10 infosec tools that one might use
to have maximum information security. Some other topics that I found useful in his
presentation is outlining information security based on Risks, Threads and
Vulnerabilities with different controls that needs to be in place. This workshop
provided participants with an overview of the field of information security
management with the goal of motivating Pacific ITC organizations and professionals
to seek out infosec training and certification.
I have learnt a lot from this workshop as I am the office responsible for the Bank’s
security firewall and have introduced to some of the best infosec tools.
FOSS
The Free Open Source Software workshop presented by Ghislain Hachey from
Infosyst Open Solutions (IOSN) demonstrated the use of FOSS to implement a
reporting system using a real life example of the Solomon Islands Schoolnet project.
It’s basically a short workshop on how to install, administer and the use the system.
I got feedback from my Solomon Islanders friends who are employees of PFNet that
this reporting system is a vital tool for them. Ghislain even go as far as
demonstrating on the live reporting server.
IPCop firewall proxy server (www.ipcop.org) is another good use of FOSS that I get
to introduced to presented by Bryn Scott of Forum Fisheries Agency (FFA). IPCop is a
small network firewall appliance that FFA is currently using. The workshop goes
through some of the available add-ons FFA uses to customize and add features to its
basic IPCop setup.
Franck Martin from PICISOC gave another very good detailed workshop on how to
setup a small office network again using FOSS. I am familiar with most of the
configurations using Linux server buts its good listening to an expert like him
pointing out the current best practices especially with configuring a basic firewall.
Coming from a Microsoft background, I have made myself available for all FOSS
training. From the conference I leant that the best secure system is a system that
you built it yourself from open source.
I have learnt a lot from the conference but have outlined only some that are brought
to my attention.
Document Management System
The digital office was another interesting presentation by Jan Battaerd from Office
Automation Software (OAS, www.oas.co.nz) with real life examples from the
Vanuatu National Provident Fund and the Department of Lands in Vanuatu. I have
been very fortunate to have attended this presentation as the Reserve Bank is
currently looking at doing the same for its archiving system and I would recommend
this company as they already have Vanuatu experiences. I heard about Vanuatu
National Provident Fund and Lands Department of Vanuatu digitizing their documents
but have no idea of the company behind it until this presentation.
HOW I WILL SHARE MY LEARNING
The Vanuatu IT Users Society (VITUS) will benefit more from the Vanuatu
participants that attended the conference as we meet together after the conference
to discuss improvements and new developments to our ICT Society following the
practices from other regional ICT User Societies. These issues are currently
discussed on our mailing list. VITUS has been loaned a prototype of the OLPC XO
laptop for demonstration purposes. We are currently scheduling demos with
stakeholder organizations in the coming weeks. I have scheduled the Reserve Bank
of Vanuatu Staff for the group to do a demo
Back in the office, the workshops, tutorials and the exposure to the new products
and developments is vital to me as I will have some justified recommendation to the
choice of new technologies. I will recommend highly the use of FOSS in government
institutions and currently developing my FOSS skills to be able to make the move. I
am looking at migrating slowly to FOSS at the Reserve Bank of Vanuatu. Currently
we have a couple of servers running on FOSS that were setup after some tutorials
during the PaciNET 2004 in Port Vila.
Vanuatu is currently into process of adapting a prototype of the PFNet (People First
Network, www.peoplefirst.net.sb ) that is successfully running in the Solomon
Islands and the exposure that I had during the conference will really help me as I
have volunteered to help out in the implementation of this project.
RECOMMENDATIONS
I have nothing more to recommend further on how to improve the fellowship but was
very pleased with arrangement leading up to the funds available with me. I thank
the Pacific Internet Partners for their trust in all participants that the funds will be
used wisely and for the purpose allocated for. The funds were used to pay for my
airfare from Port Vila to Honiara via Santo and the top up partial funding for traveling
allowance given by the Bank.
CONCLUSION
PacINET 2007 was a very successful trip for me as I get the opportunity to expand
my ICT experience technically and knowledge on issues that are affecting the ICT
development at the regional level. Once again, I am very thankful for PIP for giving
me this opportunity to travel to such a very good conference.
Thank you very much.