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Ask Slashdot: Management Software For Small Independent ISP?

Posted by samzenpus on from the a-little-help-please dept.

First time accepted submitter Vorknkx writes "I work in a small ISP. Most of our customers have cable modems but some of them are using Canopy or Ubiquity products. To manage all that, we're using a number of programs and solutions not necessarily made for such a task that are kept up to date simply using copy and paste. We have an Access database for all our internet customers, an Excel document for our wireless users, The Dude to monitor every user and a custom-made web application to monitor traffic. Needless to say, we're starting to hit the limit and juggling between all these programs is a complete pain. Is there some kind of all-in-one solution that would allow us to eliminate all the copy and paste while keeping the same functionality?"

4 of 141 comments (clear)

  1. LAMP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Just build yourself a LAMP setup, with workers feeding a database, and web GUI to access/update.
    Sync data from other sources into that, to provide a single converged view of whatever item (customer, router, location, network link...whatever). (Don't forget copious use of memcache btw)

    Trust me....this works really well and scales to millions of customers :-)

    1. Re:LAMP by Morpf · · Score: 4, Informative

      Or go LAPP and use PostgreSQL instead of MySQL. ;)
      But either way: Try to automate all recurring tasks, try to make all information necessary for one job visible from one spot.

  2. ISP management by ruir · · Score: 4, Informative

    I was in your position some years ago. I also know that our main operator wasted millions in Incognito software just to throw it away, and ended up paying millions to Microsoft. Obvious not the average "small ISP", but I hope you get across my point. Small/medium ISPs end up writing their own custom software, because there is not a specialized/vertical package that works as it should. I ended up doing that too, and connecting my software to a in-house developed ERP package. Check my profile in linked.in. Regards, http://pt.linkedin.com/pub/rui-ribeiro/16/ab8/434/

  3. Typical. by westlake · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "I work in a small ISP."

    This sums up the problems with most "Ask Slashdot" stories.

    This "small" ISP could have 50 clients or 15,000.

    There is no way to know.

    Budgets? Staffing? Your guess is as good as mine.