On Saturday morning, we were in the office again at 9am. We had left some bits behind in the IT office on Friday and so we rounded this all up and loaded it into the Land Cruiser.
Our international staff families have their internet provided and managed by us and so, due to the office move, their internet was now down. Today, our priority was to install the new firewall at one of the houses and then link up all the other houses by a series of point to point wireless antennas. This is a completely new technology for me to be working with and so it was quite a challenge to get to grips with how it all worked and what was the correct way for us to wire everything up.
Frustratingly, 3 hours later, we still couldn’t get part of the network working. We had got the internet set up and working from the firewall but somehow this wasn’t passing through to the houses. Well so we thought… more on this later.
We then had to quickly drive to the hangar in Kajjansi because MTN - the ISP for the new office - was on site to install the satellite dish for the Internet connection. They mounted it on the roof of the hangar as this is the highest point with line of site to the receiving antenna at MTN.
They had their own engineers there and so we had some time to continue to troubleshoot the international families' wireless remotely. I started changing configurations and phoned one of the families, but no, still no internet. I then get a call from Steve to say the Internet has stopped working after being up from around 10.30 this morning.
This absolutely baffled us?! How can he have internet in his house which happens to be the furthest point from the house we installed the internet in, and yet the house we installed it in doesn’t have a connection? So I put the settings back again and he was up and running.
A hometown reunion!
We continued to be baffled through the night and so we agreed to try and troubleshoot some more on Sunday afternoon when we had a bit of free time. We spent the evening with the family we are staying with, Mark and Sarah Newnham. We had a great homemade dinner and then went outside in the garden to sit by the fire Mark had made.
We were also joined all evening by an old MAF UK employee, Gillian Withell. This is the first time we have met but it was great to hear her journey and now works for Medair.
We also found out that Mark, Sarah, Gillian and I are all from the same part of the UK within 15 minutes of each other! It was like a home town reunion in Kampala! What a coincidence.
Mark and Sarah’s 2 daughters, aged 2 and 6, wanted to show us their ballet performance whilst we were outside. It was so sweet! I was also recommended to try a Tangawizi by my wife while here and so had the opportunity tonight. It’s a non-alcoholic ginger ale. Very nice if you like ginger but I’m not too keen.
