We visited a few of the possible venues, and for one reason or the other the Golden Tulip Farah. was selected as the venue to be used for the AfNOG and AfriNIC meetings. It was also selected for accommodating the AfNOG workshop participants, instructors, secretariat staff and the AfriNIC entourage.
The Ecole Mohammadia d'Ingénieurs (EMI) was selected as the site to be used for the workshops and tutorials. This was based on the fact that:
The site review was based on several questions:
In the Golden Tulip hotel, each room is equipped with a desk with a Moroccan power socket and an RJ45 jack for Internet access. The hotel sells 12hr vouchers@150 dirhams for Internet access. It was interesting to note that the vouchers had a validity period of 12hrs. (127.0.0.1 & AfNOG sec is negotiating free Internet access).
American travellers are still well-advised to bring adapters for Moroccan sockets: you'll only find Moroccan sockets at the Hotel and the EMI.
Each room also has RJ45 ethernet (labelled 'INT'), this is regular DHCP IPv4 Internet behind a 10.0.0.0 NAT BOX. It doesn't have IPv6 connectivity unless we put it in.
Internet access in the room is not free, and bring your patch cord as the registration desk may not be able to cope with demand. Note that there is no wi-fi access in the rooms but the regular ethernet worked fine for me. Steve and Hishams did not work for them. It seems there are more RJ45 connections than there are LAN switch ports, so when you request for access, they then patch you on to the switch.
There is a single wi-fi access point located in the business center on the ground floor close to the registration desk.
Room phones are on the bedside tables, so bring a long phone cord and some couplers if you want incoming calls at your desk.
In Maputo where we had a near similar arrangement in terms of the workshop/tutorial classrooms and meeting rooms being at a different site from the hotel. In this case the workshop/tutorials willbe at the EMI and the meetings will be at the Golden Tulip Farah (where we will all be lodging).
EMI
The local host has a verbal agreement with two (2) providers for external connectivity. The two links will be provisioned and terminated where we ask them to, the proposal is to terminate the circuits in the workshops NOC. The proposed links to be provisioned are:
Golden Tulip Farah
A few possible options to get connectivity to the hotel:
All connectivity lands in the communications room on the ground floor.
All the rooms (1-6) have plenty of ethernet jacks on the walls, All the RJ-45 jacks in rooms 1-4 terminate in rack located in the NOC of the main workshop classroom block (rooms 1-4).
Rooms 5 and 6 have their RJ-45 jacks terminating in the rooms next to them labeled NOC. (I honestly did not check where Room 5s ethernet jacks terminated, but I suspect they terminate in the main NOC for the Institute).
There are fibre connections from the main NOC next to Room 5 in the Electrical Engineering Dept. to all the other buildings on campus. The fibre connection to the main workshop classrooms building (i.e. Rooms 1-4) terminates in the WS-NOC room. There is also a fibre connection from the main EMI-NOC to the Room-6 NOC. We should be able to create a separate workshop network from the campus network either by patching the cables to a different core switch or by creating VLANs on their switches to segment our network from the campus network.
Belhaj who is in charge of the network at the EMI has assured as that what we want can be built for us, all we need to do is specify what we want with enough time/notice for him to get our demands met.
Golden Tulip Farah
The network infrastructure at the Golden Tulip is built using only Cat-5 cables. There hotels network for guests and the conference rooms consists of a core switch on the ground floor that connects to switches strategically located on each of the floors. Each floor has two distribution points, serving rooms in the right wing and the other the left wing (See typical hotel floor layout . Each of the distribution points has one (1) or two (2) switches, for lighting up the ethernet points in the rooms.
The Oudayas and Chellah meeting rooms each have one active (1) ethernet point, and the Salmiah has two (2) active ethernet points. If I recall well, the Hotel Tech guy (who only spoke french) was very willing to get his guys to assist us put in extra network access points if we need them for putting in more wireless access points.
There is no wi-fi APs in the main workshop classroom block (rooms 1-4 and WS-NOC), neither were there any active wi-fi APs in the classrooms located in the Electrical Eng. Dept. (rooms 5 & 6). However with the number of ethernet outlets in the classrooms, it will be easy to put in our own wireless network.
Belhaj did mention that they have a number of Cisco APs that could be used for the workshop classrooms or the meeting rooms at the hotel.
Golden Tulip Farah
Wi-fi access is only available in the lobby of the hotel.
Aggregate total per room for rooms 1-4 is more than 3x32A; and that should be enough for our purposes.
I did not checkout the aggregate power for rooms 5 & 6, but since they are already being used to run Cisco training labs, I figure they will survive what we usually throw at them.
The hotel meeting rooms should also be able to handle the load since almost all of the participants will be using notebooks. However there were enough sockets in the meting room to cater for the AfNOG/AfriNIC crowd.
Note that they have this convention of power sockets on UPS being red and thoseon the normal grid white.
The ATM machines in town will take most cards or so I was told. Did not actually locate the closest one to the hotel.
Ayitey Bulley
July 2007
