Resources for ISP Sysadmins? 39
Okolo Callender asks: "I work for the local telephone company on one of the Caribbean islands, and am the tech in charge of all internet services. Most of my time is spend maintaining our ADSL network. With almost no training, I have become quite good at maintenance and troubleshooting of our network, however I am finding it difficult to find books or online information that tackle tips and techniques more specific to ISP admins. General LAN networking info and raw Cisco documentation is fine, but I would like to find more 'cookbook' style solutions to common ISP-related problems. What books and/or online resources can the Slashdot crowd recommend?"
Google? (Score:2, Troll)
Re:Google? (Score:1, Troll)
Re:Google? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Google? (Score:2)
Re:Google? (Score:1)
i often links that are very valuable when reading ask slashdot articles like this. so its not only the person who asked the question that get benifits.
Re:Google? (Score:2)
If they have, they must suck at using google most of the time.
A good number of the ask.slashdot.org questions I almost cut and paste into google and report the findings and get modded up as informative or insightful.
Yes, a good number of the ask questions are that lame. Either that, or they are very void of pertinent information.
Re:Google? ... informative? (Score:2)
I imagine that's because most of us have no real deep incite into the subject but comment anyway and so degrade the signal-to-noise level.
With a google you can get comments like "use Z-product it has this feature". With experience you get "while Z-product has this feature that should save hours of work, I found that unless I did X-action first it took twice as long".
Google is great but knowledge does
5 seconds on google turned up (Score:5, Informative)
Usenet was the place... (Score:2)
Too bad usenet is dieing and forums are taking over. Thats just sad.
Re:Usenet was the place... (Score:1)
Too bad usenet is dieing and forums are taking over. Thats just sad.
It's a shame.
One important resource (Score:2)
carribean? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:carribean? (Score:1)
it seems ideal: tropical island, don't have to be overly competent, can browse slashdot
Re:carribean? (Score:2)
Re:carribean? (Score:2)
Mod me Flame Bait But.. (Score:1)
Re:Mod me Flame Bait But.. (Score:1, Flamebait)
Mod THAT flamebait!
Re:Mod me Flame Bait But.. (Score:2)
the monastery of the scary devils (Score:2)
TINC
If you're self taught... (Score:2, Insightful)
books24x7 (Score:3, Informative)
Re:books24x7 (Score:1)
Re:books24x7 (Score:1)
$400 buys a lot of book ... (Score:2)
Also libraries here in the UK will get books for you if you order them. They can order from other libraries or will buy if necessary. I think you have to pay a small fee to show willing. But it's small compared to the cost of buying the books.
The books24x7 thing sounds great for reference material (http://marketing.books2 [books24x7.com]
The best place to get answers.... (Score:2)
Casing the joint! (Score:4, Insightful)
A little searching and you can find that ISP - what are the odds that there will be a few misconfigured devices that leave a security hole or two because the underfunded admin never got that information.
And then the attacks begin....
Re:Casing the joint ... I smell honey!! (Score:2)
Probably a nice move for recruiting hackers actually.
Or maybe not?
No one book... (Score:4, Insightful)
An ISP sysadmin is a very specialized area and over the past few years the field has gotten smaller and smaller with everyone buying out everyone else. So your pretty much on your own.
I've just spent the past year doing Telecom Eng. Technology at the Collage of the North Atlantic. The courses included L2 to L4 switching, tcp/ip, network cabling, LAN's and DSL(Why they put these together), digital telephony, voip and prevoius to that I did a mess of eletronics and math courses. That broad range of courses still left out alot of topics which I covered on my own. I really made of the best of all the lab time I could get, built my own model internet out of old 2600 serise routers, a few linux boxes
Anyway my point is, you have to understand the underlying technologies and from there build a working knowledge of how to use your equipment at hand.
Oh yea and don't underestimate the power of linux in networking. A linux box can handle just about any task/service above layer 2, just gota get good hardware and with the money you save not buying cisco buy two or more, so you can always have a hot backup.
Damn NDA (Score:3, Funny)
Cisco best practices (Score:3, Informative)
I've been in a similar situation before. I never really found many ISP-specific resources. There's discussion boards that pertain to ISPs but mainly I used that resources that broke it down by specific service or task. ie spam filtering, virus prevention, network redundancy, security, bonus user services, administration ease, etc. An ISP has to encompass all of that and more, much more so than any other IT shop. Plus you have to do it on a budget and you have to not piss off the paying customers, all while attracting more paying customers. It's a challenging environment. Best of luck.
David's Internet Provider Resources...Amazing.com (Score:1, Informative)
David's Amazing Internet Services: Internet Provider Resources
http://www.amazing.com/internet/ [amazing.com]
It is a bit dated but still good.
Start with (Score:2)
ipfw add deny tcp from your.isp.subnet/xx to any 25
compensating for IOS/pf/iptables/ipchains as required