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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!yarrina.connect.com.au!classic.iinet.com.au!swing.iinet.net.au!news.uoregon.edu!netline-fddi.jpl.nasa.gov!usenet.eel.ufl.edu!tank.news.pipex.net!pipex!news.mathworks.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!howland.reston.ans.net!agate!reason.cdrom.com!usenet From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@FreeBSD.org> Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Help Needed for ISP Using FreeBSD Date: Wed, 25 Oct 1995 21:55:29 -0700 Organization: Walnut Creek CDROM Lines: 45 Message-ID: <308F14C1.15FB7483@FreeBSD.org> References: <46m18i$1lv0@news-s01.ca.us.ibm.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: time.cdrom.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 2.0b1 (X11; I; FreeBSD 2.1-STABLE i386) To: Don Adams <donadams@cris.com> Don Adams wrote: > At the risk of flames, I ask the following: > Can anyone recommend, or offer services, for a "turn-key" setup solution for > implementing an ISP on Free BSD? This is not actually a question that's easy to answer.. It's sort of tantamount to asking whether or not anyone offers a turn-key "computing" solution for FreeBSD - it's so broad a category as to be impossible to answer in 500 words or less. It's certainly possible to provide all manner of "ISP services" with FreeBSD, and generally using very little in the way of add-on tools. You can do slip/ppp and shell accounts pretty much "out of the box" and providing WEB service is a simple matter of loading a WWW server like Apache, configuring a few files and voom - you're off! However, like many things, the devil is in the details. You need to do day-to-day administration of your users. You need to plan for your estimated growth and buy hardware solutions that scale well. You need to deal with setting up DNS, a news feed, reliable email delivery (which requires almost constant attention once you grow to any reasonable size since users are always finding new ways to bounce their mail with ill-conceived forwards or filters. In short, it quickly becomes less of a technical matter and more of an adminstrative one. Finding the right guru to run this mess will avail you far more than any turn-key software package ever could. Sure, it's possible to automate a few very trivial tasks, but there's no substitute for a pair of skilled eyes and unfortunately, these are 99% of what you need. This is the main reason we haven't put too much effort into trying to automate the process of being an ISP - it'd be really really difficult to make it general enough to be of significant use! That said, I'm sure that somebody could write a slick little command and control program that would greatly *assist* an ISP administrator in his or her workday, but that'd be a good man year or two's worth of work and nobody, to my knowledge, has made that kind of R&D investment yet. > If there are no such services available, is there such a thing as a >comprehensive FreeBSD tutorial? The handbook at http://www.freebsd.org provides some useful tutorials on setting up services that would be of interest to you, but comprehensive? Not really. That is unfortunately going to take more volunteers than we currently have.. :-( -- Jordan