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Resources for ISP Sysadmins?
Okolo Callender asks: "I work for the local telephone company on one of the Caribbean islands, and am the tech in charge of all internet services. Most of my time is spend maintaining our ADSL network. With almost no training, I have become quite good at maintenance and troubleshooting of our network, however I am finding it difficult to find books or online information that tackle tips and techniques more specific to ISP admins. General LAN networking info and raw Cisco documentation is fine, but I would like to find more 'cookbook' style solutions to common ISP-related problems. What books and/or online resources can the Slashdot crowd recommend?"
I use Google.com a lot. Lots of info...
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
this
Check out the presentations and the resources links.
Lived on usenet during my early ISP days, since there wasnt many places you could get info on setting up routers or portmasters, or even configuring radius, usenet was the place.
Too bad usenet is dieing and forums are taking over. Thats just sad.
One of the best resources available...
Somebody get that guy an ambulance!
Are you hiring?
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
BOFH
Shouldn't the ISP admins write the books?
They'd love to answer all your questions about how to run an ISP for you - and if they really like you they might even let you in to the other place!
TINC
If you're self taught and in the thick of it you probably know more than most people. I expect you don't realise how much experience you've gained. Maybe you should consider putting up a site for other people in a similar situation to you, if you're seeing the need for one.
I was conned by an old man in a cloak. It turns out those *were* the droids I was looking for.
At my job, they recently signed us up for Sillport (an e-learning system), which also includes a subscription to books24x7.com. This is a coleciton of several thousand technical and business books, fully searchable and browsable online. I think a personal subscription runs about $400 a year, hopefully you can get your boss to expense it for you. Well worth it in my opinion.
Is right here.
"The newly born animals are then whisked off for a quick run through a giant baking oven." --heard on Food Network
hawt!
Hmmm, a post from an admin of an ISP saying that he does not have training on his systems etc.
A little searching and you can find that ISP - what are the odds that there will be a few misconfigured devices that leave a security hole or two because the underfunded admin never got that information.
And then the attacks begin....
In general your going to have to find books on each specfic technologies. Most of the general ISP resources are from the mid 90's when dial up was all the rage.
/w OC-3 cards, multilayer switches, DSLAM's and wireless bridges. Got a chance to mess around with a good mix of different layer 1 and layer 2 technologies along with a few different routing protocols. One course I totally underestimated was level 2 to 4 switching, I had no idea that ethernet switching was so complex.
An ISP sysadmin is a very specialized area and over the past few years the field has gotten smaller and smaller with everyone buying out everyone else. So your pretty much on your own.
I've just spent the past year doing Telecom Eng. Technology at the Collage of the North Atlantic. The courses included L2 to L4 switching, tcp/ip, network cabling, LAN's and DSL(Why they put these together), digital telephony, voip and prevoius to that I did a mess of eletronics and math courses. That broad range of courses still left out alot of topics which I covered on my own. I really made of the best of all the lab time I could get, built my own model internet out of old 2600 serise routers, a few linux boxes
Anyway my point is, you have to understand the underlying technologies and from there build a working knowledge of how to use your equipment at hand.
Oh yea and don't underestimate the power of linux in networking. A linux box can handle just about any task/service above layer 2, just gota get good hardware and with the money you save not buying cisco buy two or more, so you can always have a hot backup.
God, root, what is the difference?
*shakes his fist at his NDA*
_______
2B1ASK1
I've been in a similar situation before. I never really found many ISP-specific resources. There's discussion boards that pertain to ISPs but mainly I used that resources that broke it down by specific service or task. ie spam filtering, virus prevention, network redundancy, security, bonus user services, administration ease, etc. An ISP has to encompass all of that and more, much more so than any other IT shop. Plus you have to do it on a budget and you have to not piss off the paying customers, all while attracting more paying customers. It's a challenging environment. Best of luck.
I work for the local telephone company on one of the Caribbean islands, and am the tech in charge of all internet services even though I don't really know what I'm doing.
Tell your boss that I do know what I'm doing and am willing to work in the Caribbean.
What you probably want to check out is
David's Amazing Internet Services: Internet Provider Resources
http://www.amazing.com/internet/
It is a bit dated but still good.
Also an excellent way to sell a honeypot to unsuspecting slashdotters.
Probably a nice move for recruiting hackers actually.
Or maybe not?
>>>"I almost cut and paste into google and report the findings and get modded up as informative"
I imagine that's because most of us have no real deep incite into the subject but comment anyway and so degrade the signal-to-noise level.
With a google you can get comments like "use Z-product it has this feature". With experience you get "while Z-product has this feature that should save hours of work, I found that unless I did X-action first it took twice as long".
Google is great but knowledge does not equal wisdom.
If there's only a few of you I'd have thought that a group library of n x $400 would be enough resource to keep you reading for the year. Maybe about 8 people would have to club together.
...
Also libraries here in the UK will get books for you if you order them. They can order from other libraries or will buy if necessary. I think you have to pay a small fee to show willing. But it's small compared to the cost of buying the books.
The books24x7 thing sounds great for reference material (http://marketing.books24x7.com/browseabout.asp) but if you want to read something
ipfw add allow tcp from your.isp.subnet/xx to your.mail.server.pool/xx 25
ipfw add deny tcp from your.isp.subnet/xx to any 25
compensating for IOS/pf/iptables/ipchains as required
Music is everybody's possession.
It's only publishers who think that people own it.
Fuck Beta
~John Lenno