Starting Small ISP / Hosting Company

Brad Knowles brad.knowles at skynet.be
Wed Aug 8 10:59:19 UTC 2001


At 7:24 PM +1000 8/8/01, Mark Frost wrote:

>  My name is Mark, I am in the process of starting a small ISP / Hosting
>  company. The ISP will run on linux, debian or redhat, I'm not too sure
>  (open to suggestions)

	If you have to run Linux, I would suggest one of the more 
server-oriented versions, such as Debian or Slackware.  I would 
recommend avoiding Red Hat for this kind of application.

	If you decide that you need to run something based on Red Hat, 
then I'd suggest getting Bastille Linux, which is based on Red Hat 
but has been hardened for more secure operations.


	However, if you really want to run a secure and scalable shop, I 
would encourage you to look at other alternatives.

	FreeBSD is used by the largest sites in the world (including 
Yahoo!, Hotmail (Microsoft is still having a devil of a time 
replacing it), etc... and the world's largest anonymous ftp server is 
running FreeBSD.

	If you want a more security-oriented OS (and you don't need 
features like symmetric multi-processing), then you should check out 
OpenBSD, which is well known as being the most secure out-of-the-box 
OS available.

	If you want to run on platforms other than Intel x86, then I'd 
suggest looking at NetBSD.

>  I will need to nameservers, running bind.  But, I just don't know where
>  to start with the hole idea of bind... I was looking at using webmin as
>  the GUI, making it easy to edit files etc.

	The webmin interface to BIND 9 is relatively limited, and because 
it uses the web, is likely to be less secure.  If I were just getting 
started with my own ISP, I think I'd be more likely to look at 
QuickDNS Manager in combination with BIND.  See 
<http://www.menandmice.com/> for more information.  Unfortunately, 
neither QuickDNS nor Webmin will scale to a significantly larger 
operation, so you may also want to look at commercial alternatives 
based on BIND (see 
<http://www.isc.org/products/BIND/vendorware.html>).

>  Is their any documents out there for ISPs looking at starting with bind?

	Not that I'm aware of, no.  If you find any, please let me know.

>  Or just starting an ISP in general..

	Again, not that I know of.  If you find any, please let me know.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles at skynet.be>

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