There will probably be a lot of people say this, but the first answer which springs to mind is don't do it. It's very costly, and certainly no longer something you can do with a single Linux box and a DSL connection.
That said, if you do want to do it, first thing you'll need to do is make sure your business plan will be profitable. I know it's tedious, but sit down in front of a spreadsheet program and work it all out: hard questions include:
Is it feasible? You did say you lived in the country - there's probably a reason there's only one ISP.
Will it make money? If not, why are you doing it - you're going to have to work out how to pay the rent some other way if it's not going to pay.
How will you support your customers? When they phone you in the middle of the night because their printer's stopped working, have you got the patience to help them or tactfully tell them that it's not your problem?
What if your upstream provider goes bust? Once upon a time nobody thought this would ever happen, but after several major providers filed for Chapter 11...:(
Do you have contracts? Seriously, in this increasingly litigious world you can save lots of hassle, stress, lost sleep, and ultimately cash, by hiring yourself a good lawyer from day 1 who will make sure that all the limited liability blurb is in your contracts. There are a lot of bedroom ISPs out there who have fallen over through someone down the road taking legal action, and them not having the money to fight it. Hence the case doesn't even get to court and the ISP is bust. Be serious: get your contracts sorted and stick to them.
How will you buy all the kit? Dialup stacks and routing hardware don't grow on trees you know - however I've seen quite a few good deals on Cisco dialup kit on eBay, and if you're doing partial BGP to peer with your upstream providers a secondhand Cisco 3640 will quite happily do the job.
How will you manage the subscriber base? There are several prebuilt and homecooked packages out there, but you'll probably find that you don't really know what you need until you're up and running. Remember it's a rental system you're running, so you'll need to decide how to work the finances and contracts if someone cancels mid-term - do you refund them an unused portion of a month? What defines a "month", is it the number of days in that month or do you just split a year into 12 of them?
Now assuming you've asked yourself the difficult questions and got satisfactory answers, go out and find yourself a good accountant or at least someone who'll take care of the day-to-day finances for you. If you're a scatterbrained geek like I, then you'll have to reel in some favours perhaps. I use my wife for that sort of thing - it works quite well;)
Then, and only then, do you start to work out your network map, and do all the fun stuff. Don't be a Dot Com;)
Note: I've been brainstorming while writing this so there will be a lot I've missed out. I've rescued and set up ISPs and businesses before, some of which have succeeded and some of which have failed. I speak from experience of 1991 through to the present, so don't take this as a base course in setting up a business;) - usual #include <disclaimer.h> I'm afraid;)))
On another note, I notice that CentralNic have sex.eu.com up for auction as their charity thingy for the Farmers In Crisis fund, at www.auctions.eu.com, and nobody's bid for it yet...
I've done some reading on this subject, and the culture. Useful stuff and resources:
Where Wizards Stay Up Late - a history of the Internet from about 1940 through until 1980. Covers John Licklider (the psychologist who invented the neural net application to computer networks), John Postel, Vint Cerf and more.
The Nudist On The Late Shift - a very good account of the culture of Silicon Valley in the mid-90's.
Geeks
Anything by Robert X Cringely.
I'm away from home at the mo so can't completely check the library, but I strongly recommend "Where Wizards...".
You'd be surprised the fun which goes on at conferences such as RIPE and IETF when WaveLAN virgins get onto the network and realise it isn't
secure.
You might have heard of a guy called Randy Bush, whose favourite party trick at such events is to sniff the WaveLAN, and email out to captured POP3 usernames their own password with the message 'Be careful with radio!'. It's not even a switched network as a default install.
Setting up some sort of VPN using PoPToP isn't a bad idea in such cases, although WaveLAN does have some security built into it. Personally I use
the Buffalo Technology kit which seems to work for 'doze, BSD and Linux.
I've heard rumours that if you wander through Stockholm's business district or through the Square Mile in London, if you're in promiscuous mode you can pick up all sorts of transmissions and a large number of DHCP servers offering IPs to anyone who gets the ESS ID right.
Hope this helps someone. Just be careful out there;)
I'm the red-shirted guy from Mailbox Internet who was buying the beer on the Friday, and spent most of the Expo talking to people who didn't believe I was who I said I was because I was wearing a tie and not the usual ThinkGeek fare;)
On the subject of suits and geeks, I'm actually glad I had the shirt on - most of the geeks got hold of me because I was talking tech, and a lot of the suits gave me more time because I had a shirt and tie on - sad but true.
I'm the MD at Mailbox, and yes the parking situation at Fulham is small. But the Fulham location is designed to be an inexpensive colocation facility and not a huge colo facility - again, you gets what you pays for and we've got a load of space at the Telehouses (both City and Docklands) for that sort of stuff.
Most of the people who choose low-cost colo travel on the Tube or by taxi, or only have one box. We have quite a few Powersledges down there which get shipped to us via Citylink or somesuch, and we don't charge for plugging 'em in and turning 'em on.
We're working on opening up another (larger) building in Putney, which is about half a mile down the road, and has a huge pile of carparking space not to mention things like generators and goods lifts.
Take a look at the webpage for cheap colocation for more info, or talk to Michael, Jerry or Charlotte, who are our marketroids. They can all answer questions about it for people who want to know.
Finally, there's about 300 photos of the show at photos.jml.net, including the Mailbox Party on the Friday.
You can do this in Britain as well - you need to ask British Telecom for a "Key-line Baseband" line. They'll only do it if both ends are in the same exchange and they don't like selling it, but Mailbox Internet sell it as a product in the Fulham area of London.
Using the Pairgain kit you can drive a single pair up to about 1.1meg, or if you use 4-wire circuits you can get about 2meg. The greater the distance though, the lower the signal, you have to remember that.
As I recall, Demon used to give it away to their staff as a perk - Mailbox seem to be doing that as well now.
FWIW, we put a link into the local pub, The Southern Cross.
Can I get my hands on one in the UK? I just took a look and you have to subscribe to their ISP thingy to get one, and that's only in the US. I was about to buy one to play with when I saw that they won't ship out of the US.
At $99, it's worth it just for the LCD screen to attach up to rackmount machines. Anyone managed to rip the head off one of these things yet?
And a thought: these things would make excellent cheap EPOS machines by the look of it. And certainly a lot cheaper than NCR's offerings.
Here in the UK I used to fondly use Viewdata bulletin boards such as Cyclone, The Cellar, CCl4, Optix, Chipboard and the suchlike. Based upon the Teletext character set (think Prestel) and populated for the most part by BBC Micro users, the community was great and to a certain extent was killed off when ANSI boards came round. Indeed, the infamous Steve Gold/Robert Schifreen "Prince Phillip" hack was carried out on a Viewdata system in 1984 - as detailed in Hugo Cornwall's Hackers Handbook (now out of print) and Approaching Zero: Data Crime And The Computer Underworld (still in print, published by Faber&Faber).
Now, as James Lawson puts it on the CCl4 web site, the ANSI board is all but dead. Most boards have been surpassed by the Internet and indeed FTP sites and websites as you rightly state; Fido feeds have been surpassed by Usenet; message areas by maillists. It's back to information provision and suchlike.
There has been, for some years now, a Viewdata Revival going on, which puts forward many of the arguments. Unfortunately the website is a bit stale but it does give you a sort-of hail back to the days of CARBBS, XFS+ and EBBS board hosts running on 32k BBC Micros with (if you were lucky) 20Mb Winchester hard disks - none of this 24Gb filespace and 18 CDs online rubbish.
There are several Viewdata bulletin boards now online on the Internet, run from Acorn Archimedes machines using Gareth Babb's excellent VHost software. Mine is called Haven and you can get to it without even a Viewdata emulator, by using the online Java-based client. Alternatively there are bits of software you can use to access them.
Of course, there are still ANSI boards available via telnet - the UserFriendly one immediately springs to mind. But you still won't get back the sort of thing which you had with Viewdata.
This looks very much to me like a quick cheap way to become a registrar without (a) paying NSI's $75 registration, or (b) without becoming a CORE registrar with all the bond and financial baggage which comes with it.
I suspect a lot of people out there will be very happy with this, mostly the small-time 'Net companies who have a rack in Telehouse and deal with lots of smaller clients. Having said all that, I know of at least one project which is creating a not-for-profit registrar along the same lines as the UK's Nominet registry, doing it on a membership basis. It'll be interesting to see how it all develops in relation to this project.
You mention "price war". If the "cost price" is $13, then I can see people doing domains at $13.01 - after all, with the sheer volume of domains registered it'll all add up just like call minutes do with UK dialup ISPs. The real benefactors of this are likely to be the ICANN/CORE registrars who do domains at $10 or so, who will swallow the glut of the business.
It's a pity it still has to go through NSI after all that though. And the site itself is mostly "coming soon" messages:(
Depends on the sort of code really and the mood - I have about 5,000 CD albums in my collection (not to mention the MP3s) so what usually happens is that I'll listen to a particular set of CDs for a few days and then it'll change.
Styles range from jazz, to synthpop, to chart pop, to classical music.
Current music (no laughing please):
Pat Metheny Group: very good background "supermarket music" for coding. Doesn't get too distracting, and always very uplifting.
Jacques Loussier Trio: Damn good jazz versions of classical music such as Ravel's Bolero et al. Does great versions of Satie's Gymnopaedie (is that the plural?) as well.
Bis: Great to bounce to on a late-night coding binge.
The Cardiacs: Not for the faint hearted. Mayhem, can be very distracting if it's "not your thing". Recommend getting a sampler CD or something before you splash out on albums and stuff. But also fires something in me which makes it (a) impossible to sing along to, and (b) highly creative in the ideas department. Drives my wife mad.
Pink Floyd: "Dark Side Of The Moon", "Wish You Were Here", and "Meddle" being favourites - but mostly "Wish you..." mainly because I keep on forgetting to take it home from work;)
Chumbawamba: NOT "Tubthumping", but the earlier stuff like "Anarchy" and "Sssh!".
Shit Pop: stuff like S Club 7, B*Witched, Steps and suchlike. Sing-along happy-go-lucky tunes which annoy the f*ck out of the rest of the office.
Other little bits in no particular order: Shania Twain; Bernstein (especially "Rhapsody in Blue" and "Overture from Girl Crazy"); Jamiroquai; some Elvis Costello; Andy Williams; Burt Bacharach; Cardigans; Levellers; Pet Shop Boys...
That's it basically. I guess it depends on your point of view and what makes you creative. About the only things which don't make me happy music-wise are leaky earphones from the bloke next to me wearing the Walkman, and hardcore happy house and all that crap. OK, call me old. I'm not, I'm 25.;)
BR
Joel. (Happily going through the CD collection now!)
This doesn't surprise me - John Vranesevich is yet another self-proclaimed "Internet security expert" who airs his opinions to anyone who will listen and has a blatant disregard for netiquette and common sense. One of a few individuals who seem intent on spoiling it for everyone else, and using lawyers and legalese to wriggle out of their little holes. Maybe he should just go and shack up with Carolyn Meinel, James Winsoar, and the rest of them.
I can think of better ways to use time than to piss off HNN, Slashdot, Attrition, etc. - some of us argue that they actually do a bloody good job. Before this came out, I did recall seeing a few days ago on Hacker News Network some stuff about the two groups being completely dissimilar: I'm wondering if this has been going on for a week or so and it just hasn't surfaced.
It's LinuxExpo this October in London, so we've yet got to really experience first-hand if the poor among us couldn't travel to the States.
But things I'd like to see? Hmm...
Distro people there, and a good debate about the merits of various distributions and packaging methods employed, by the people who set it all up - Patrick Volkerding et al.
People like Oracle, IBM, etc. giving away noncommercial freebies of their software to play with - same sort of thing Sun did at their recent DevDays (I was at the London one, we got a big bag full of things to play with, white papers et al).
T-shirts. T-shirts are good.
I'm at a Sun ISP seminar tomorrow night and plan to ask them about their Linux involvement, as the main reason we ditched Slowaris was because Linux offered cheaper and better performance. Talking to hardware vendors about their plans for Linux would be a general plus to a show I guess.
...and finish it all off with a competition - the oldest computer to run Linux;)
Slashdot Mirror
That said, if you do want to do it, first thing you'll need to do is make sure your business plan will be profitable. I know it's tedious, but sit down in front of a spreadsheet program and work it all out: hard questions include:
Now assuming you've asked yourself the difficult questions and got satisfactory answers, go out and find yourself a good accountant or at least someone who'll take care of the day-to-day finances for you. If you're a scatterbrained geek like I, then you'll have to reel in some favours perhaps. I use my wife for that sort of thing - it works quite well ;)
Then, and only then, do you start to work out your network map, and do all the fun stuff. Don't be a Dot Com ;)
Note: I've been brainstorming while writing this so there will be a lot I've missed out. I've rescued and set up ISPs and businesses before, some of which have succeeded and some of which have failed. I speak from experience of 1991 through to the present, so don't take this as a base course in setting up a business ;) - usual #include <disclaimer.h> I'm afraid ;)))
Joel.
On another note, I notice that CentralNic have sex.eu.com up for auction as their charity thingy for the Farmers In Crisis fund, at www.auctions.eu.com, and nobody's bid for it yet...
- Where Wizards Stay Up Late - a history of the Internet from about 1940 through until 1980. Covers John Licklider (the psychologist who invented the neural net application to computer networks), John Postel, Vint Cerf and more.
- The Nudist On The Late Shift - a very good account of the culture of Silicon Valley in the mid-90's.
- Geeks
- Anything by Robert X Cringely.
I'm away from home at the mo so can't completely check the library, but I strongly recommend "Where Wizards...".You might have heard of a guy called Randy Bush, whose favourite party trick at such events is to sniff the WaveLAN, and email out to captured POP3 usernames their own password with the message 'Be careful with radio!'. It's not even a switched network as a default install.
Setting up some sort of VPN using PoPToP isn't a bad idea in such cases, although WaveLAN does have some security built into it. Personally I use the Buffalo Technology kit which seems to work for 'doze, BSD and Linux.
I've heard rumours that if you wander through Stockholm's business district or through the Square Mile in London, if you're in promiscuous mode you can pick up all sorts of transmissions and a large number of DHCP servers offering IPs to anyone who gets the ESS ID right.
Hope this helps someone. Just be careful out there ;)
ps. I have a wife. ;)))
Urm, no, but we got offered so we took it up. Hopefully in by the end of the week, hard disk space pending ;)
I'm the red-shirted guy from Mailbox Internet who was buying the beer on the Friday, and spent most of the Expo talking to people who didn't believe I was who I said I was because I was wearing a tie and not the usual ThinkGeek fare ;)
On the subject of suits and geeks, I'm actually glad I had the shirt on - most of the geeks got hold of me because I was talking tech, and a lot of the suits gave me more time because I had a shirt and tie on - sad but true.
Anyway, my personal score for the show:
- Dust Puppy from Dark-Side Dave.
- £120-worth of books.
- A 4ft-high penguin (yes, we were the ones who took it to the pub).
- Squishy penguins from SGI and Alphanet.
- The Walnut Creek set of Slackware CDs.
- Tux cufflinks for those "I've just been told to be smart" moments.
- A new news peer for Mailbox, and several traffic peers with people in Telehouse.
- Two consecutive hangovers, and a large bar bill.
- Sore feet.
Great fun folks. There's photos of Thursday and Friday (and some more here).Hugs to y'all,
Joel
MD of Mailbox Internet
I'm the MD at Mailbox, and yes the parking situation at Fulham is small. But the Fulham location is designed to be an inexpensive colocation facility and not a huge colo facility - again, you gets what you pays for and we've got a load of space at the Telehouses (both City and Docklands) for that sort of stuff.
Most of the people who choose low-cost colo travel on the Tube or by taxi, or only have one box. We have quite a few Powersledges down there which get shipped to us via Citylink or somesuch, and we don't charge for plugging 'em in and turning 'em on.
We're working on opening up another (larger) building in Putney, which is about half a mile down the road, and has a huge pile of carparking space not to mention things like generators and goods lifts.
Take a look at the webpage for cheap colocation for more info, or talk to Michael, Jerry or Charlotte, who are our marketroids. They can all answer questions about it for people who want to know.
Finally, there's about 300 photos of the show at photos.jml.net, including the Mailbox Party on the Friday.
Hope this helps,
Joel.
MD, Mailbox.
--
Certainly not as bad as the place in Docklands which gives it's URL as:
- hppt//itdesigns.co.uk
Or the lorry I was following the other day who reckoned they were:- www.moving.com.uk
(and yes, uk.com does exist - but com.uk doesn't!).Using the Pairgain kit you can drive a single pair up to about 1.1meg, or if you use 4-wire circuits you can get about 2meg. The greater the distance though, the lower the signal, you have to remember that.
As I recall, Demon used to give it away to their staff as a perk - Mailbox seem to be doing that as well now.
FWIW, we put a link into the local pub, The Southern Cross.
- Can I get my hands on one in the UK? I just took a look and you have to subscribe to their ISP thingy to get one, and that's only in the US. I was about to buy one to play with when I saw that they won't ship out of the US.
- At $99, it's worth it just for the LCD screen to attach up to rackmount machines. Anyone managed to rip the head off one of these things yet?
- And a thought: these things would make excellent cheap EPOS machines by the look of it. And certainly a lot cheaper than NCR's offerings.
If anyone succeeds in getting one to the UK, drop us a line will you? Ta.BTW, it seems to play fine on QT3.
Now, as James Lawson puts it on the CCl4 web site, the ANSI board is all but dead. Most boards have been surpassed by the Internet and indeed FTP sites and websites as you rightly state; Fido feeds have been surpassed by Usenet; message areas by maillists. It's back to information provision and suchlike.
There has been, for some years now, a Viewdata Revival going on, which puts forward many of the arguments. Unfortunately the website is a bit stale but it does give you a sort-of hail back to the days of CARBBS, XFS+ and EBBS board hosts running on 32k BBC Micros with (if you were lucky) 20Mb Winchester hard disks - none of this 24Gb filespace and 18 CDs online rubbish.
There are several Viewdata bulletin boards now online on the Internet, run from Acorn Archimedes machines using Gareth Babb's excellent VHost software. Mine is called Haven and you can get to it without even a Viewdata emulator, by using the online Java-based client. Alternatively there are bits of software you can use to access them.
Of course, there are still ANSI boards available via telnet - the UserFriendly one immediately springs to mind. But you still won't get back the sort of thing which you had with Viewdata.
Hope this enlightens at least some ;)
Joel.
Other than that, get a copy of the UserFriendly book.
I suspect a lot of people out there will be very happy with this, mostly the small-time 'Net companies who have a rack in Telehouse and deal with lots of smaller clients. Having said all that, I know of at least one project which is creating a not-for-profit registrar along the same lines as the UK's Nominet registry, doing it on a membership basis. It'll be interesting to see how it all develops in relation to this project.
You mention "price war". If the "cost price" is $13, then I can see people doing domains at $13.01 - after all, with the sheer volume of domains registered it'll all add up just like call minutes do with UK dialup ISPs. The real benefactors of this are likely to be the ICANN/CORE registrars who do domains at $10 or so, who will swallow the glut of the business.
It's a pity it still has to go through NSI after all that though. And the site itself is mostly "coming soon" messages :(
BR,
Joel.
Even on Windoze browsers, the text on it is titchy. It's also not a lot of use either - looks like they might have changed the search algorithm.
Styles range from jazz, to synthpop, to chart pop, to classical music.
Current music (no laughing please):
- Pat Metheny Group: very good background "supermarket music" for coding. Doesn't get too distracting, and always very uplifting.
- Jacques Loussier Trio: Damn good jazz versions of classical music such as Ravel's Bolero et al. Does great versions of Satie's Gymnopaedie (is that the plural?) as well.
- Bis: Great to bounce to on a late-night coding binge.
- The Cardiacs: Not for the faint hearted. Mayhem, can be very distracting if it's "not your thing". Recommend getting a sampler CD or something before you splash out on albums and stuff. But also fires something in me which makes it (a) impossible to sing along to, and (b) highly creative in the ideas department. Drives my wife mad.
- Pink Floyd: "Dark Side Of The Moon", "Wish You Were Here", and "Meddle" being favourites - but mostly "Wish you..." mainly because I keep on forgetting to take it home from work
;) - Chumbawamba: NOT "Tubthumping", but the earlier stuff like "Anarchy" and "Sssh!".
- Shit Pop: stuff like S Club 7, B*Witched, Steps and suchlike. Sing-along happy-go-lucky tunes which annoy the f*ck out of the rest of the office.
- Other little bits in no particular order: Shania Twain; Bernstein (especially "Rhapsody in Blue" and "Overture from Girl Crazy"); Jamiroquai; some Elvis Costello; Andy Williams; Burt Bacharach; Cardigans; Levellers; Pet Shop Boys...
That's it basically. I guess it depends on your point of view and what makes you creative. About the only things which don't make me happy music-wise are leaky earphones from the bloke next to me wearing the Walkman, and hardcore happy house and all that crap. OK, call me old. I'm not, I'm 25.BR
Joel.
(Happily going through the CD collection now!)
I can think of better ways to use time than to piss off HNN, Slashdot, Attrition, etc. - some of us argue that they actually do a bloody good job. Before this came out, I did recall seeing a few days ago on Hacker News Network some stuff about the two groups being completely dissimilar: I'm wondering if this has been going on for a week or so and it just hasn't surfaced.
Joel.
But things I'd like to see? Hmm...
- Distro people there, and a good debate about the merits of various distributions and packaging methods employed, by the people who set it all up - Patrick Volkerding et al.
- People like Oracle, IBM, etc. giving away noncommercial freebies of their software to play with - same sort of thing Sun did at their recent DevDays (I was at the London one, we got a big bag full of things to play with, white papers et al).
- T-shirts. T-shirts are good.
I'm at a Sun ISP seminar tomorrow night and plan to ask them about their Linux involvement, as the main reason we ditched Slowaris was because Linux offered cheaper and better performance. Talking to hardware vendors about their plans for Linux would be a general plus to a show I guess.