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Books Education Media The Internet

Resources for ISP Sysadmins? 39

Posted by Cliff from the hard-to-find-info dept.
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?"
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Resources for ISP Sysadmins? More

Resources for ISP Sysadmins?

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  • I use Google.com [google.com] a lot. Lots of info...
    • http://fuckinggoogleit.com/ [fuckinggoogleit.com] too.

    • Re:Google? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Okolo Callender ( 888802 )
      Why does everyone assume that because a question is asked, that the person asking has not gone to google and sifted through reams of search results already. I figured that the slashdot crowd may have come across some things that I have not. Thanks for the no-help buddy.
      • Because 90% of the answers you get will come from google. Some tech reads your question, opens a new tab searches google for 10-20 seconds and posts the relvant information.
        • true. but sometimes much more relevent sites are not in google or dont come up for the key words that we use. often i have come across very valuable sites which i forget to bookmark and when i try to use google to find those sites even using keywords that i know was in there i cant find them.

          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.
      • Why does everyone assume that because a question is asked, that the person asking has not gone to google and sifted through reams of search results already.

        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.
        • >>>"I almost cut and paste into google and report the findings and get modded up as informative"

          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)

    by Neil Blender ( 555885 ) <neilblender@gmail.com> on Wednesday June 01, 2005 @07:14PM (#12699810)
    this [nsrc.org]
  • Lived on usenet during my early ISP days, since there wasnt many places you could get info on setting up routers or portmasters, or even configuring radius, usenet was the place.

    Too bad usenet is dieing and forums are taking over. Thats just sad.

    • Too bad usenet is dieing and forums are taking over. Thats just sad.

      It's a shame. :( I was hoping that google's newsgroup goop would liven up usenet but that's not what seems to have happened.
  • One [jager.com] of the best resources available...

  • carribean? (Score:3, Funny)

    by nocomment ( 239368 ) on Wednesday June 01, 2005 @07:39PM (#12700021) Homepage Journal
    Are you hiring?
  • Shouldn't the ISP admins write the books?
  • They'd love to answer all your questions about how to run an ISP for you - and if they really like you they might even let you in to the other place!

    TINC
  • If you're self taught and in the thick of it you probably know more than most people. I expect you don't realise how much experience you've gained. Maybe you should consider putting up a site for other people in a similar situation to you, if you're seeing the need for one.

  • books24x7 (Score:3, Informative)

    by tchuladdiass ( 174342 ) on Wednesday June 01, 2005 @10:42PM (#12701307) Homepage
    At my job, they recently signed us up for Sillport (an e-learning system), which also includes a subscription to books24x7.com. This is a coleciton of several thousand technical and business books, fully searchable and browsable online. I think a personal subscription runs about $400 a year, hopefully you can get your boss to expense it for you. Well worth it in my opinion.
    • I don't know how it compares to books24x7.com, butI'm pretty happy with my subscription to O'Reilly's Safari [oreilly.com] online library. Most stuff that I need to know is on the web, but a couple times a month I really need a good book on the topic, and O'Reilly usually has what I need.
    • I'm interested in Sillport, but it seems to be a Google Whack [google.ca]. Do you have a link?
    • If there's only a few of you I'd have thought that a group library of n x $400 would be enough resource to keep you reading for the year. Maybe about 8 people would have to club together.

      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]

  • Casing the joint! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by justinmc ( 710870 ) on Thursday June 02, 2005 @04:08AM (#12702438)
    Hmmm, a post from an admin of an ISP saying that he does not have training on his systems etc.
    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....

  • No one book... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Garak ( 100517 ) <{ac.cesni} {ta} {sirhc}> on Thursday June 02, 2005 @08:15AM (#12703144) Homepage Journal
    In general your going to have to find books on each specfic technologies. Most of the general ISP resources are from the mid 90's when dial up was all the rage.

    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 /w OC-3 cards, multilayer switches, DSLAM's and wireless bridges. Got a chance to mess around with a good mix of different layer 1 and layer 2 technologies along with a few different routing protocols. One course I totally underestimated was level 2 to 4 switching, I had no idea that ethernet switching was so complex.

    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)

    by eyeball ( 17206 ) on Thursday June 02, 2005 @08:31AM (#12703269) Journal
    *shakes his fist at his NDA*

  • Cisco best practices (Score:3, Informative)

    by macdaddy ( 38372 ) on Thursday June 02, 2005 @09:31AM (#12703750) Homepage Journal
    You may find this PDF [cisco.com] useful. Actually the whole site [cisco.com] is quite useful.

    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)

    by Anonymous Coward
    What you probably want to check out is
    David's Amazing Internet Services: Internet Provider Resources
    http://www.amazing.com/internet/ [amazing.com]

    It is a bit dated but still good.
  • ipfw add allow tcp from your.isp.subnet/xx to your.mail.server.pool/xx 25
    ipfw add deny tcp from your.isp.subnet/xx to any 25

    compensating for IOS/pf/iptables/ipchains as required

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