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List:       infrastructures
Subject:    [Infrastructures] non-profit ISP setup
From:       Kenneth McCracken <ken () scriba ! org>
Date:       2001-12-11 14:12:01
Message-ID: Pine.LNX.4.21.0112110838400.21276-100000 () mansfield
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Hello Steve,

I am managing Toronto Freenet(now Toronto's oldest dialup, ISP since 1994
supplying barrier-free access to Toronto citizens) these days. We are
attempting to offer a reliable service, but it has been difficult and a
lot of the problems have been around (volunteer) sysadmin issues and
hardware failures. I was wondering about a pathway to a more solid
footing. We are migrating from antiquated sun equipment to AMD equipment
with dual IDE drives configured for software RAID1 running freebsd and a
single cisco as5200 router. We need to grow the ISP operation in an
orderly way to provide a (income) foundation for other more forward
looking projects.

I've mentioned the Gold server concept/infrastructures.org site to the
technical people involved, and I pretty much get silence. 

We also will soon be bringing to various low income people a few
sites(hopefully remotely administered) where they access the internet via
a high speed connection through lans of various configurtions:

 1. 10-20 low end pentiums and and a lan server
 netbooting to recover client systems if files are messed with. 

 2. Similar lans with fewer mid-level pentiums, with fileserver to
 preserve working hooome directories 

 3. Higher end pentiums as internet kiosks in tight quarters

The president of our sponsoring (colocating and bandwidth wholesaling)
host is willing to take an evening to do some of the hands on configuation
stuff, but I am not sure he will take the time to set it up so that it is
easily replicatible.

Our budget is quite limited, so I was wondering if you might already have
some out of the box solutions or prescriptions for these particular
situations.

Ken McCracken
Executive Director
Toronto Free-Net
416-828-9323



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