Petur Zachariassen and Jógvan Martin Grástein
The Faroe Islands were put on the Internet map in January this year.
The research institutions in the campus area in Torshavn were connected through
a 64 Kbit/s leased line between the Department of Natural Sciences at the
University of the Faroe Islands and UNI-C in Lyngby, Denmark.
In the autumn of 1993 three people - Arne Mølgaard from the Teachers'
College, teacher and consultant Regin Ellingsgaard and Petur Thorsteinsson from
ISmennt initiated a School Data Communication project, which was supported
financially by the West Nordic Co-operation (Vestnorden-sambarbejdet).
Simultaneously the research institutions in the campus area were about to finish
a project interconnecting their LANs with optical fibre.
These two
projects joined forces, so to speak, in a project called Sleipnir,which was
established with the aim of designing and implementing a suitable
infrastructure, enabling the schools and the research institutions to be
connected to the Internet.
The Sleipnir project started in August 1994
when computer scientist Jógvan Martin Grástein was employed for a
part-time job at the University to prepare the Internet connection and to
supervise the campus backbone net.The Sleipnir project, which also received
financial support from the research institutions, will be completed by the end
of 1995. Preparations are now being made to establish a network administration
(Netumsiting) as a separate unit to take over the task from the Sleipnir
project.
The first technical issue in the Sleipnir project was to decide on the type
of international connection. In principle there were two alternatives: an X.25
connection or a leased line. With good will from UNI-C and the Danish Ministry
of Education it was decided to use the latter solution with a bandwidth of 64
Kb/s.
The line goes through the CANTAT-3 optical cable connecting
Canada with Europe passing south of Iceland and north of the Faroes. The fibre
yields a stable and fast responding connection. The mean response time when
pinging a host at UNI-C from the campus area is between 50 and 60 ms. However,
since the Icelandic connection passes the NORDUnet backbone in Stockholm, the
mean response time to ISmennt is higher, varying from 150 to 500 ms.
All
research institutions on the campus got their LAN (Novell NetWare 3.11or 3.12)
some years ago. A couple of years ago a backbone net of optical fibre was
stretched between the research institutions. The LANs were connected to the
backbone net by making each NetWare server a router between the LAN and the
backbone net.
One additional NetWare server, called Sleipnir, was
equipped with variousMercury NLMs to handle SMTP and POP3. In order to simplify
mail handling, all users on the campus login on their local server and attach
toSleipnir - thus there is no need to deliver mail between servers. Applications
to which all users on the campus need access were also placed on the
Sleipnir-server.
A terminal server with ten ports was set up to give
users with modem accessto the Internet using PPP. These users have a POP3
account on the Sleipnir server. At present four telephone lines are connected to
the server and about 50 users are using this option. Most dial-up users use
Netscape for Internet surfing and Eudora or Pegasus for e-mail.
A
router (RoutESS, V. Morrison & H. Jonsson), also connected to the backbone
net, is used to route smaller nets (32 hosts) through telephone lines to the
Historical Museum and the National Center for Educational Materials. In the near
future one or two additional routers of this kind will be set up to route small
nets to other educational institutions. We now receive DNS- and News-services
from UNI-C, but we plan to setup our own DNS-server.
A combined web-
and ftp-server was established at Netumsiting last august. HTTPD v1.4c (Robert
B. Denny) used as web-server program. As ftp-server program we use Serv-UFTP
v1.1h (Rob Beckers, Cat Soft). The main web-address is www.sleipnir.fo, and the
material on the web service so far consists mainly of general information about
the Faroe Islands and information about campus research institutions in English.
For the time being the Internet users in the Faroe Islands can be divided
into two main groups: campus users, who have a direct Internet-connection, and
dial-up users, mainly consisting of schools and educational institutions. On the
campus there are currently approx. one hundred PC's, three Suns and one PC/SCO.
The PC's get access to the Internet by using Windows 3.1/3.11 and the
Trumpet-Winsocket. Netscape is used for web-browsing; for e-mail handling on the
local PC's we are using Pegasus Mail (by David Harris) which seems to be a
suitable mail program in a NetWare environment. A DOS-version of Pegasus is also
available, so older PC's not running Windows can also be used for e-mail.
The
table below shows the institutions on the campus and the correspondingdomains.
Institution Domaine --------------------------------------------------------- The University The University Administration fsf.fo The Department of Faroese fmd.fo The Department of History and Social science ssd.fo The Department of Natural Sciences nvd.fo The Historical Museum of the Faroes* fms.fo The Natural History Museum ngs.fo The Faroese National Archives lss.fo The Faroese National Library flb.fo The Food and Environmental Institute hfs.fo The Fisheries Laboratory of the Faroes frs.fo --------------------------------------------------------- * placed outside the campus
Since all users on campus, as well as dial-up users, use the Sleipnir server
for mail services, the domain "sleipnir.fo" is common to all
institutions. A short description of the institutions can be found on the
web-address www.sleipnir.fo.
The majority of the users, who use the
dial-up option, are school teachers. At several schools there a couple of
teachers who have a POP3 account on the Sleipnir server. According to the
following table around 40% of all schools from secondary schools and higher are
now connected to the Internet.
Dialup Total ------------------------------------ Secondary schools 6 18 High schools 4 7 Other higher schools 3 6 ------------------------------------
At the moment it is only the university and the other research institutions
that have direct Internet-connection. According to a deal with TFL (the Faroese
telephone company) the dial-up option at Netumsiting can only be used by
institutions and persons involved in education and research. However, TFL is
planning to provide Internet services for private and commercial users, and they
should be ready at the beginning of next year.
The rate of international
telephone calls (3.40 DKR/min in daytime to Denmark) has probably been keeping
companies and persons in the Faroes away from using Internet-services provided
by Internet-providers in Denmark.To illustrate this interest we could mention a
Faroese company which this fall has registered an address on an Icelandic
nameserver with a "company_name.fo" alias and thus offering its
customers e-mail services. The name should also be registered at UNI-C in
Denmark, which manage the ".fo"domain internationally.
The use of the Internet will undoubtedly boost the influence, that information technology has on development of society. Communications and the use and distribution of information on this planet has been put in a new perspective. The Faroese community has got some special facets, that should make the use of the Internet quite important.
The Faroese people are generally communicative with a strong tradition of informal information flow. For instance the frequency of telephone calls for personal use is relatively high in the Faroes. Because of the dearth of experts within many areas the Faroese often have to be "multi-purpose" and "multi-tasking" professional, thus enabling a smooth flow of information between different disciplines. The informal communication used on the Internet is likely to suit the Faroese well.
The volume of statistics, administrative data and information as a whole will be almost proportional to the size of the population of a country. The efforts needed to collect and coordinate information in the Faroes should be considerably smaller than in a large and more complex society. Even though the function is similar to that in a larger community the small volume should make information handling easier.