Rwandan Engineers Complete Hands-On MANRS Training

By Grace Ingabire, CEO of RICTA

The Rwanda Internet Community and Technology Alliance (RICTA), in partnership with the Internet Society, recently concluded a three-week, practical training for local engineers from local ISPs and network operators.

The training was conducted via the e-learning platform Moodle, where all participants accessed the course material and studied at their own pace while facilitated by experts from the Internet Society and AFRINIC throughout the weeks. The participants were sourced from the IXP (Internet Exchange Point) community in Rwanda. RICTA manages the Rwanda Internet Exchange Point (RINEX) and trainees were mostly engineers from ISPs connected at the IXP.

MANRS was the main topic of the training, and so the four actions of the network operator program were discussed thoroughly:

• Filtering
• Anti-spoofing
• Coordination
• Global Validation

During the training, weekly lessons were conducted via video conferencing and in between the calls, we used a WhatsApp group that allowed participants to engage with each other and the facilitators anytime.

Trainees were also given access to a hands-on lab to allow them to apply the MANRS principles on a virtual network that simulated real world connectivity between an ISP and its network peers.

The trainees spent roughly an hour a day learning MANRS over the three-week period. The technical know-how gained in this course will help the participants improve the Internet routing system in Rwanda. It will also bring a positive impact to some of their ISP customers on security, since they now know how ISPs can address certain security vulnerabilities and eliminate most common routing threats.

“The training was really beneficial and relevant to me. The content was organized and easy to follow,” said David Bushake of KTRN Rwanda, one of the participants. “Worldwide, as thousands of routing incidents occur, the security of the global Internet routing is crucial to the Internet’s reliability and stability. I now understand the different ways to improve our network securities by implementing different techniques. I learned something new and I am planning network optimization to reinforce MANRS actions.”

Gatete Yves of Axiom, another participant, said, “This was an interesting course, very practical and we are going to plan an implementation process of technical skills gained.”

RICTA/RINEX became a member of MANRS IXP programme in 2017 and now is involving its members to learn and mobilize them to join MANRS, hence this training was organized.

We are hopeful that the course will inspire engineers affiliated with other networks in Rwanda to also join MANRS.

If you are a MANRS participant organization interested in having similar trainings, please contact us at manrs@isoc.org.