Date: Wed, 24 May 2000 16:21:30 -0400 From: "Troy Settle" <troy@picus.com> To: <lures@mozcom.com>, <freebsd-isp@freebsd.org> Subject: RE: Need advice on software for ISP startup using FreeBDS 4.0 Message-ID: <NIEBLEDADLBOBAJFKPHDOEEKCAAA.troy@picus.com> In-Reply-To: <240500145.41002@207.206.68.172>
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** 1. Dial in service up to 56K, no ISDN or DSL/ADSL or domain hosting. If you are supporting 56k dialup, you can support ISDN without additional equipment or configuration. ** 2. Single PPP node and Multi-link PPP only. Standard ** 2. No slip or shell or user access to native FBSD, no NFS server. Good decision ** 3. No PAP or CHAP Authentication. Reccomend use PAP w/Cistron Radius ** 4. Would like to use Kernel PPP mode instead of User PPP mode. You have a cisco for dialup. no PPP needed on the FreeBSD box ** 5. Provide subscribers Web pages, email services, FTP, and censored ** newsgroups. Reccomend you outsource news. ** 6. Firewall for security and to drop all banners and auto Web ** Page spawning. Have fun with this one. You'll probably end up paying lots of money and/or spending lots of time getting something to work for this. ** 7. Dial in users use Dynamic addressing. Standard stuff. Any modern NAS will handle this beautifully ** 8. Using a bundled CISCO AS5301-CH terminal server with 48 modems ** and 2 T1-24 channel lines for dial in. I would reccomend that you reconsider your choice of NAS. My experience with Cisco has been that they make good routers but awful dialup equipment. ** 9. One Full T1 line to UUNET for internet access. You sure you want UUNut? For a startup, I would reccomend you go with a regional ISP that has several transit providers. This gives you the advantages of multi-homing without the cost, and a smaller organization to deal with on support issues, etc.. ** 10. Pentium 3, 733 MHz / 133MHz Bus, Mother board with 100MHz ** bus with 256MB/100MHz bus dimm. ** 11. 3C980B-TX Fast etherlink server NIC, 100baseT. ** 12. 29160N Adaptec SCSI card with Seagate Barracuda 18GB Ultra ** 160 and 2 IDE 10GB Ultra66. Over kill. I would reccomend spending the same money on a pair of Celery boxes w/IDE drives. You can split your services over those 2 boxes and get much better performance. The important thing to note, is that very little stuff the ISP does is CPU intensive. It's disk and memory intensive first, and modern systems with modern drives (even IDE) won't present a barrier to performance. ** 13. Everything will be on the 18GB drive except the newsgroup ** data which will be on 1 IDE drive and the other IDE drive will ** be a backup of the running system, no email. Again, reccomend that you outsource news. A single T1 won't handle a feed, and you'll need a rather large machine to handle the load (tons of memory and disk). You say no email? back in item 5, you say you are offering email services. Which is it? =) ** ** Questions ** ** 1. Will the Vinum Volume Manager provide any benefit to me in ** my current config? You'll know when you need vinum. If you want to start right, make /home a vinum filesystem using 3 drives (Raid 0+1), and deliver mail to $HOME/.mail(dir/). Which brings us to the next question: ** 2. Do I have to use quota to limit disk space for web page subscribers Yes, you'll want quotas if you care about how much space people are using. I would reccomend a /home filesystem completely seperate from other filesystems. I again reccomend delivering mail to the users' home directories. ** or can it limit space by login script? I don't think this is an option. Though it doesn't matter, because you're not offering shell access. ** 3. Do I need Radius- Remote authentication server because I'm ** using an CISCO AS5301-CH terminal server? Is /usr/ports/net/radius ** the one I should use? Can I install this software before I have ** the terminal server in place? Reccomend Cistron Radius. It's rock solid and is being actively developed (well, freeradius is anyways). ** 4. For Dial in users to use Dynamic addressing, I believe I need ** DHCP. The ports collection has 2 versions, wide-DHCP and ISC-DHCP2. ** Which one should I use or is their a better one some were else? Your NAS will handle the assignment of IPs from a defined pool. DHCP and dialup networking don't usually mix well (except in NT's RRAS) ** 5. For a web server Apache looks like the one, but the port collection ** has 7 versions of Apache13, which one do you use?. If you just need the basics, stick with the basic apache13. If you want to have some fun, give apache13-php3 a shot. ** 6. Still looking for SMTP and POP3 software. If it's in the ports ** collection I didn't see it. Where can I find it? If you are planning on doing POP3 only, then I would reccomend postfix for SMTP, procmail for local delivery, and cucipop for the POP3. If you also want to offer IMAP access, I would reccomend postfix for SMTP, and cyrus for POP3/IMAP. If you go this route, ignore the suggestions in questions 1 and 2 about delivering mail to home directories. ** 7. Am I missing anything? An experienced network and systems admin? My resume is availiable at http://home.i-plus.net/st/resume.html. I'm not cheap from the perspective of a startup, but my salary requirements are reasonable. Good luck, -Troy To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message
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