PH Pioneers Celebrate 20 Years of Internet

By: Jerome Auza The Internet seems to be a natural thing nowadays but for the pioneers, 20 years after the first time the country was officially connected to the Internet via selected colleges and universities, those times were unforgettable. I consider myself lucky being one of the pioneers at the University of San Carlos – Talamban Campus when I was a fourth year college student taking electronics and communications engineering.  Back then, getting hold of a technical book at the library is just like winning the lottery.  You’d be lucky to be able to borrow a book about programming or software development.  You are competing for a few books with an army of hundreds of students. At that time, the USC-TC organized its Center for Network Management and Services which essentially was the implementing arm of the university for the PHNet project (http://www.ph.net/about.html).  I volunteered to do something on the UNIX server which was a computer only a handful of students would ever have access at that time.  If you were somehow involved in the PHNet project, chances are you may have seen an email from me which was adm@durian.usc.edu.ph at that time.  We named our servers at USC-TC after fruit trees. The center has one of the largest bandwidths available at that time: 64kbps!  And there were dial-up users who were so happy at one time when we upgraded their modem connections to 14.4kbps from 9.6kbps.  My main job was to monitor the usage and provide utilization reports of the modems.  At that time, you had a limited set of programming languages available:  C language and some scripting...

Malaysia Flight 370 – Where Is It?

A desperate search for the missing plane of Malaysia Flight 370 is still going for a week even with all the high tech equipment and advanced surveillance systems of various countries who helped in the search including the USA and China.  It’s still a humbling reality that even with all our high tech capabilities, nature will still pose a very big challenge to humankind. The vastness of the potential crash sites simply overwhelm many of the systems and processes used in the search. Commercial airplanes have redundant systems on communications and flight systems. They have multiple systems for tracking and location reporting. So how come Flight 370 just suddenly disappeared? Terrorist attack? An accidental explosion? Some sectors have started to entertain possible alien abduction.  An equivalent of an ‘albularyo’ even conducted a ritual at the airport in Kuala Lumpur hoping to help locate the plane. As the search continues, let us offer our prayers to the passengers and crew of Flight 370.  Given more time, our high tech systems can eventually locate the plane and hopefully the survivors also. Let us just hope it would be found sooner than...

BCCI Holds General Assembly

The Bohol Chamber of Commerce and Industry held its annual general assembly on March 15, 2014 at the Dagohoy Hall at the Bohol Tropics Resort, Tagbilaran City.  The governor of the province, Gov. Edgar M. Chatto and the city administrator of Tagbilaran, Mr. Leonides L. Borja on behalf of City Mayor John Geesnell Yap, represented the government sector.  Atty. Emmanuel Aladin D. Tumanda presented the president’s report which included an audio-video presentation showing the year’s activities of the chamber. The organization was deeply involved in relief efforts after the 7.2 magnitude struck the province on October 15, 2013. Senator Paolo Benigno Aquino IV was the guest speaker and his message to the chamber is “jobs and enterprise for inclusive growth”.  The senator is promoting support structure for the small enterprises.  A bill authored by the senator called “Go Negosyo” is nearly passed as a law and it will help small enterprises. The chamber also held the election of the board of trustees as well as inducted its new...

Securing Computer Networks If Providing WiFi for Customers

It is a common practice for service companies like hotels, resorts and restaurants to be providing WiFi Internet access to its customers.  However, there is a common mistake also for such companies.  The WiFi network is on the same network segment as the office computers.  This is a security issue because now you are allowing strangers to have local network access to your computers. In order to avoid the issue where the WiFi users can access your local network, the office network must be on a separate network segment, with its own router and firewall blocking any unauthorized access from outside the network. Another concern with sharing Internet access to customers is that your own Internet access might become slower also because of the increased download and upload activity. There are firewall devices available on the market that allows you to segment the network into two or more subnets.  You can put the office network on one subnet and the customer WiFi access on the other.  Then on the firewall, define the rules such that incoming traffic from the customer subnet is blocked if it is going to the office subnetwork. With a little change on the network configuration, one can increase the computer network significantly.  With the constant threat of malicious Internet activity, it is important for business owners to secure their computer network to protect its business...

Getting Ready for a Half-Day Power Interruption

by: Jerome Auza Before I had setup my experimental solar power system, a power interruption like that scheduled on March 9, 2014 would mean that we need to purchase gasoline worth around Php800.00 to keep the office network running.  It’s probably more expensive these days with the gasoline hitting the Php60.00/liter mark. I checked my solar system today and I have 57% charged batteries.  The system seemed to have charged slowly the past two days.  I expected close to 100% charge after two days with lots of sunshine.  This is something for investigation later.  However, at this time, what I need to know is how long can I run the network without resorting to the generators. If the sun is out most of the day during the power interruption, I would expect to be able to run the network for at least 10 hours.  To be sure, I plan to turn off some of the non-essential equipment like that powering up the LAN of the office since there will be nobody working. My wife who runs a maternity clinic at Talibon, Bohol has her own solar system also and is currently fully charged and should enable her to run the most important equipment at her clinic during the power interruption.  Services like ultrasound and fetal montiring for her patients at St. Gerald’s Maternity and Wellness Clinic should continue even without electricity. I have one 300W solar panel coming soon so the articles in the coming weeks should be interesting since I can start configuring the system to run the office network 24/7 on solar power.  I’m still a long...