under the façade it is just another BSD clone. it'll run telnetd (if you enable it), it'll run sshd (if you compile and startup), and it'll run sendmail, ps, kill, ifconfig, route, dd, rm and reboot. what more could you ask for?
i suspect they will keep many NeXTisms, such as a non-traditional/etc/passwd that borrows features from Sun's YellowPages, and a "lookup" daemon for DNS-like chores. the filesystem might be "reorganized", which putting it kindly.
if you intend to be stand-alone, you can lobotomize the cluster administration services and never be the wiser.
if you want to stay on United States soil -- but only barely -- try the island of Guam, located 15 north of the equator and south of Japan. here's an approximate payscale for geeks in a technology-based service market:
it's at GMT+10, so forget calling businesses on the US mainland unless you're a nocturnal geek. the sunrises are spectacular.
a T1 cost between $350-$600/mo depending upon location. ISDN arrived 2 years ago. but that's irrelevant since the bandwidth off-island is $20k/mo/E1.
housing for a 1BR is about $1000/mo for "on the beach in the tourist town" and $600/mo for someplace safe enough for a machine rack. a car is a requirement (and costs $1500-$2000 to ship each way), and scuba gear is strongly recommended.
the people are amazingly friendly and slightly quirky as a bonus; i guess you would have to be if you regularly shrugged off typhoons, earthquakes, and airplane crashes.
luckily, some cable companies realize that their pipes can carry more than just residential traffic.
one cISP i'm particularly fond of (@Home) has a subsidiary (@Work) which packages cable Internet (among other products) over the same infrastructure, with different contractual obligations. i can't say whether reselling bandwidth is permitted, though.
off-subject, one of the local burrito shops who wanted cable-TV has a 10-year-old response from a local cable company framed on the wall. it explained that because it was not a residence, the shop would have to pay the full equipment cost -- over $50,000 -- to essentially bring it across the street.
so be sure your POP is already wired for cable, and that the cISP offers a commercial product.
i have recently completed a stint in Guam starting a best-of-breed ISP. i used to be of the school that all you had to do was stick modems to the front of a remote access server, drop in a random UNIX server, and add a T1 to a nearby commercial Internet backbone service. luckily, my parent company in Guam had all the extra infrastructure to build out a real service and become profitable in under a year.
if you are looking to startup a small thing for your friends, defining your target configuration is pretty trivial. marketing is a NOOP, your churn rate is not an issue, and if you're lucky, they might be just as technically qualified as yourself.
but if you're looking to enter the market competitively, your problems have compounded...
* choose a market that's under-tapped or overpriced. if you have the choice of location, start in a remote market and learn the ropes at your pace, not the pace of Goliath.
* add service offering that's a visible improvement over the competition. traditionally, customers will switch products if it's a couple times better. in the ISP marketplace, however, it seems to take only marginal service improvement.
* do pre-launch marketing. launching your ISP with 20 to 50 sign-ups a day in your first week feels wonderful.
* customer service makes a difference -- both positively and negatively. albeit cold, if you spoon feed your customers, they don't learn how to feed themselves. but you'll lose new subscribers if they can't figure out where the "connect" button is. being the only ISP supporting an alternate OS in a market can bring you most of those users (and wouldn't it be nice if they weren't just mouse-jockies but the self-sufficient nomadic geeks?)
* don't skimp on your front end. the all-in-one boxes that are modems and remote access servers (e.g. PortMaster3, TotalControl) that take in an ISDN PRI are a major win. it's the only way to get 56kbps (aka 53kbps), and to sanely manage multiple modems.
* stick with established and robust technology. if an OS, server, remote access server has zero user base, it effectively means you are the beta tester, and that's crippling. generally, the bulk of your customers will not differentiate between the hardware or software choices you make, merely the uptime and responsiveness. buy a shrink wrapped solution if it means you can spend your time on more customer-visible improvements. don't buy shrink wrapped solutions if you'll spend more time learning how to wrangle the product than rolling your own.
* prevent things from breaking. you must have an UPS. you must have a pager, paging software, and a monitoring daemons. but you must delegate the work or you'll miss out on important things (like a second perspective, or sleep).
* be concerned about security. turn off your OS's network-accessible bells & whistles. do your work on a different machine than your server. admit there is no such thing as a secure menu-shell. consider that any LAN can be sniffed. never share admin passwords; create separate accounts for each admin or customer service representative. containment is your friend.
* be prepared to re-engineer constantly. you don't need a full T1 the day you open, but you should keep your link's peak utilization below 50% to 80% (the threshold is dependent on how much money you have to burn). when you get a certain size, you will need to diversify your internet connections. then you may have the trauma of re-addressing all your equipment if you want diverse connections to make any difference.
* think like a business, not like a startup. pro-actively get new customers, maintain existing customers' satisfaction, expand your product line, keep a close eye on benchmarks, fix your problems promptly, and generally be ruthless.
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under the façade it is just another BSD clone. it'll run telnetd (if you enable it), it'll run sshd (if you compile and startup), and it'll run sendmail, ps, kill, ifconfig, route, dd, rm and reboot. what more could you ask for?
/etc/passwd that borrows features from Sun's YellowPages, and a "lookup" daemon for DNS-like chores. the filesystem might be "reorganized", which putting it kindly.
i suspect they will keep many NeXTisms, such as a non-traditional
if you intend to be stand-alone, you can lobotomize the cluster administration services and never be the wiser.
a T1 cost between $350-$600/mo depending upon location. ISDN arrived 2 years ago. but that's irrelevant since the bandwidth off-island is $20k/mo/E1.
housing for a 1BR is about $1000/mo for "on the beach in the tourist town" and $600/mo for someplace safe enough for a machine rack. a car is a requirement (and costs $1500-$2000 to ship each way), and scuba gear is strongly recommended.
the people are amazingly friendly and slightly quirky as a bonus; i guess you would have to be if you regularly shrugged off typhoons, earthquakes, and airplane crashes.
... and go see a "spin doctor".
one cISP i'm particularly fond of (@Home) has a subsidiary (@Work) which packages cable Internet (among other products) over the same infrastructure, with different contractual obligations. i can't say whether reselling bandwidth is permitted, though.
off-subject, one of the local burrito shops who wanted cable-TV has a 10-year-old response from a local cable company framed on the wall. it explained that because it was not a residence, the shop would have to pay the full equipment cost -- over $50,000 -- to essentially bring it across the street.
so be sure your POP is already wired for cable, and that the cISP offers a commercial product.
i have recently completed a stint in Guam starting a best-of-breed ISP. i used to be of the school that all you had to do was stick modems to the front of a remote access server, drop in a random UNIX server, and add a T1 to a nearby commercial Internet backbone service. luckily, my parent company in Guam had all the extra infrastructure to build out a real service and become profitable in under a year.
if you are looking to startup a small thing for your friends, defining your target configuration is pretty trivial. marketing is a NOOP, your churn rate is not an issue, and if you're lucky, they might be just as technically qualified as yourself.
but if you're looking to enter the market competitively, your problems have compounded...
* choose a market that's under-tapped or overpriced. if you have the choice of location, start in a remote market and learn the ropes at your pace, not the pace of Goliath.
* add service offering that's a visible improvement over the competition. traditionally, customers will switch products if it's a couple times better. in the ISP marketplace, however, it seems to take only marginal service improvement.
* do pre-launch marketing. launching your ISP with 20 to 50 sign-ups a day in your first week feels wonderful.
* customer service makes a difference -- both positively and negatively. albeit cold, if you spoon feed your customers, they don't learn how to feed themselves. but you'll lose new subscribers if they can't figure out where the "connect" button is. being the only ISP supporting an alternate OS in a market can bring you most of those users (and wouldn't it be nice if they weren't just mouse-jockies but the self-sufficient nomadic geeks?)
* don't skimp on your front end. the all-in-one boxes that are modems and remote access servers (e.g. PortMaster3, TotalControl) that take in an ISDN PRI are a major win. it's the only way to get 56kbps (aka 53kbps), and to sanely manage multiple modems.
* stick with established and robust technology. if an OS, server, remote access server has zero user base, it effectively means you are the beta tester, and that's crippling. generally, the bulk of your customers will not differentiate between the hardware or software choices you make, merely the uptime and responsiveness. buy a shrink wrapped solution if it means you can spend your time on more customer-visible improvements. don't buy shrink wrapped solutions if you'll spend more time learning how to wrangle the product than rolling your own.
* prevent things from breaking. you must have an UPS. you must have a pager, paging software, and a monitoring daemons. but you must delegate the work or you'll miss out on important things (like a second perspective, or sleep).
* be concerned about security. turn off your OS's network-accessible bells & whistles. do your work on a different machine than your server. admit there is no such thing as a secure menu-shell. consider that any LAN can be sniffed. never share admin passwords; create separate accounts for each admin or customer service representative. containment is your friend.
* be prepared to re-engineer constantly. you don't need a full T1 the day you open, but you should keep your link's peak utilization below 50% to 80% (the threshold is dependent on how much money you have to burn). when you get a certain size, you will need to diversify your internet connections. then you may have the trauma of re-addressing all your equipment if you want diverse connections to make any difference.
* think like a business, not like a startup. pro-actively get new customers, maintain existing customers' satisfaction, expand your product line, keep a close eye on benchmarks, fix your problems promptly, and generally be ruthless.
* read http://www.amazing.com/isp/