I am finally able to see an end to the madness I have been working on this summer.  It’s a good feeling, however it does little to help with the tiredness i have became accustomed to over the past two months.. This week I am going to try and post some install/config tips and things that I have figured out while setting up FreeBSD 6.2 for my server environment..  Also, I should be posting some tips on PPPoE and Radius authentication that might help some people out as well..

Well.. things are starting to fall into place.

I signed and faxed my contract back to AT&T yesterday for my T1 service so I should be getting it within 30-45 days.

I have all of my servers and network equipment in and properly configured (so far).

I chose to use 3 rack mount servers and two of them will provide Radius and MySQL services with redundancy (still have to figure out that redundant part) It seems MySQL only likes one way replication with the use of two servers. I need to do some reading about the clustering ability of version 5.

One of the servers will serve as the PPPoE concentrator which will bridge the clients onto the network and provide a way to throttle/shape bandwidth with the usage of Radius for authentication which will all be stored in a MySQL database.

Lastly I have an old tower server that I’ll be using for Web and Email services. I had originally planned on using my current webhost to do all of the web/email but since they could not upgrade me to VPS when I called I decided I might as well do it in house.

In the struggle of setting all of these FreeBSD boxes up I learned that I have been out of touch with *nix for are too long. However, with this new venture I can surely see that it will be easy to stay on top of things from now on.. heh.. or more like it will be required that i stay on top of things from now on.

Over the next few weeks I am finishing up my network overhaul at work and will be trying to build a website presence for my new company as well as create a few internal sites to aid in the management of the new venture..

Well it’s late again and it seems i haven’t been asleep before 2am in the past 7 days hopefully tomorrow will be easier now that I finally got my PPPoE server working earlier tonight.

Well round one has started.. I ordered my equipment and started politicking around town and handing out my proposal (to the council members) for renting space on the city water tower today. I will go to the meeting next Monday at 7 to present the proposal and take questions.. I also went to the county water office today to find out who I’d need to talk with to get access to the area water towers.. So far things are looking great and the town is abuzz.. The good thing is while living here and working at the school and doing computer consulting for a few local businesses as well as the city and a few people who are involved I have been able to make relationships that are tending to be very good.. so stay tuned for further developments..