Re: ISP asking about switching to Debian from OpenBSD

[matthew@sackman.co.uk (Matthew Sackman)]

On Wed, Nov 21, 2001 at 09:08:25AM +1000, john wrote:
> Fred Bloom wrote:
> 
> > Cobalt is a linux ISP out of the box.
> >
> > J.H.M. Dassen (Ray) wrote:
> >
> 
> Many people regard Cobalt as a piece of junk aimed at wannabe ISPs. My impression
> is that the original poster is
> working for an already established ISP.
> 
> They are not secure out of the box, and can be a pain to modify to suit a serious
> environment. They also tend to crash a
> lot unless you put a lot of time into them, based on my experience.
> 
> My 2cents, which is of course really 1 cents at current exchange rates.


I work for an ISP and I hate the damn things.

They are really badly conceived things - no firewall tools enabled in the kernel at all,
really bad implementation of certain cervices, and generally underpowered machines. If
I was mad enough to actually own one of those things then I'd strip out cobalt's version
of linux and hack debian until it worked.

I would very seriously not recommend you touch these things for ISPs - they look easy,
but so does MS Windows, and most of us know how difficult it is to fix that when
something screws up...

The fact that they come with no firewall tools and have telnetd enabled by default should
be enough to scare off anyone with any sense! ;-)

-- 

Matthew Sackman
Nottingham
England

BOFH Excuse Board:
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