Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Fri, 9 Nov 2001 03:14:07 -0800
From:      "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com>
To:        "Mike Meyer" <mwm@mired.org>
Cc:        <questions@freebsd.org>
Subject:   RE: Lockdown of FreeBSD machine directly on Net
Message-ID:  <003f01c1690f$a5e41a20$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com>
In-Reply-To: <15339.46837.837301.883814@guru.mired.org>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Mike Meyer [mailto:mwm@mired.org]
>Sent: Friday, November 09, 2001 2:59 AM
>To: Ted Mittelstaedt
>Cc: questions@freebsd.org
>Subject: RE: Lockdown of FreeBSD machine directly on Net
>
>
>Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm@toybox.placo.com> types:
>> What always amazes me is the number of people in our town that are still
>> staggering along with these small ISP's that have been losing money for
>> years.  Don't their S.O.'s get tired of supporting them?!
>
>Hey - that looks like a *question*! So I'll answer it.
>
>There are two industries that call their customers "users". Small
>operators in both business buy the product in bulk for their own use,
>then resell the excess to other users.

Oh, we have a number of _those_ kinds of ISP's too - but those aren't the
ones losing money that I wonder about.  Those ones are generally doing OK.

The ones I'm talking about are the people that have from 200-400 dialup
users, actual offices (generally located in oldtown next to the adult
bookstores, low-rent hotels, and such) and no network lines or modem
banks of their own - they buy wholesale dialup ports and resell them
somehow, authentication/billing/virtual webserving are often done on
a single server at a colocate shelf at a more prosperous ISP.

I've talked with a few of these folks and they are forever in
danger of being cut off for non-payment of their bills.  Yearly salaries
for the one knowledgeable network admin holding the bandaid and ductape
servers together are in the 20-30K range.  RAID is nonexistent, IDE drives
abound, downtime
is frequent.


Ted Mittelstaedt                                       tedm@toybox.placo.com
Author of:                           The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide
Book website:                          http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com



To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?003f01c1690f$a5e41a20$1401a8c0>