Date: Sat, 14 Oct 1995 15:43:01 -0400 From: "Johanan L. Codona" <codona@planet.net> To: freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.org Subject: Starting an ISP! Message-ID: <199510141943.PAA16746@rustic>
next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Boy this is a quiet list! I know that there are at least thirty of you out there, so let's talk! After a great deal of discussion, some friends of mine and I have decided to start our own ISP. I have been a long-time FreeBSD user and think it would be a good basis for the system. I know others are also using it, apparently with some success. I have read the "Internet Access Provider FAQ" (http://www.amazing.com) and many other sources of accumulated wisdom on the net. It seems that BSD-derived OSs are the most popular choice (because of its networking heritage), and BSDI seems to have the biggest following among ix86-based providers. On the other hand, FreeBSD ought to be a good choice, and it is certainly less expensive at the outset (and I hope overall!). cdrom.com runs its major archive servers using it, and always seem to have their limit of 300 people on! It keeps chugging away, as apparently do the ISPs that are using it. However, before we proceed, I have a number of questions that this group might help answer. Questions: * Is FreeBSD a good choice for our OS? (As opposed to BSDI, our second choice.) * What version of FreeBSD should we use? (We are looking to go "on-the-air" in about 4-6 weeks.) * We are thinking about a fast Pentium with SCSI disks for storage. What are the best choices for: - multi-serial cards - memory per user - networking cards - other hardware? * What about software? - Accounting, etc. - Misc Monitoring - Backup software - Security - User services * Do people have any FreeBSD lessons-learned they would like to share? Since we can't be fully redundant in terms of hardware, we think that getting a second disk and frequently mirroring the user and system disk (along with the usual tape backups) would be a good way to get our system rapidly back on-line in the event of a disk failure. Any comments? Anyway, let's break the ice and at least talk about FreeBSD as an ISP platform! -- Johanan L. Codona The Stekas Group codona@planet.net
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199510141943.PAA16746>