Well as one of the last steps in getting my business organized and ready to start marketing I have been working on a billing system that would do most things for me.. to make my life easier.. and so I don’t forget to send out a bill ..

Well as I’ve posted before I am a FreeBSD shop.. well I got a vpn with CentOS to handle my monitoring system and after realizing how out of touch I was with Linux commands I decided to put Linux on the spare server I had at the office to build my backup host on.

I tried to install Freeside about a month ago on one of my backend FreeBSD servers and was rather unsuccessful.

I tried a few days ago to install it on the CentOS box and it was a slightly better experience although I still didn’t get it working..

The software is built on Debian and was designed using a Postgres database.

At this point it was clear I had two things going against me. 1.) I’ve never used Debian and 2.) I’ve never used Postgres.  The main installation issues were regarding both of those issues due to the fact they were either dependency issues or database errors.  (As I was trying to use MySQL which isn’t fully supported)

I eventually solved these problems by installing Debian Etch as a VM and not surprisingly I used apt-get to install the dependencies and then compiled and installed Freeside perfectly.

I’m still having a few issues getting RT going but that’s nothing I didn’t expect since I had such a hard time getting it working at work (although that was partly due to the Exchange server being the main mail relay)  I’m just happy my billing system is up and going now!  I was really dreading having to do everything manually using QuickBooks.

Well.. I finally got an external vps account so that I could monitor my growing network accordingly. I got Nagios installed pretty easily, however NagiosGrapher is utter annoyance. First, I had installed the Nagios RPM which for some reason on Cent OS 5 installed in some really odd directories. Nagios was working great but I spent 16 hours battling with NagiosGrapher trying to get it to work.

I eventually uninstalled Nagios and re-installed it via the source (which is what I prefer anyhow). I then installed NagiosGrapher without any problem as the default layout worked great for the ./configure script.

However, it took me quite awhile to get things to work right. The forums at NagiosExchange.com aren’t all that active the documentation for NagiosGrapher is sub-par at best.

I also have Cricket installed on this server and after I had finally got all my graphs working in Nagios I checked Cricket and noticed that the text was not showing up. I had to change some of the RRDTools permissions to get NagiosGrapher to create PNG graphs. I guess that broke Cricket; After fiddling with the permissions again I finally have a solution that works.

Life is definitely flying by right now. I have had a total of 16 hours sleep since Tuesday so I am just about dead. I only have a few other things to get in line before I can really start advertising my service and hopefully get some real clients. As far as the service things have been going great for three weeks with 100% uptime!

I am working on a wiki project right now to help organize some config files, etc. As soon as I get that up and going I should post the Back to Back DSL HOWTO as well as some Nagios Plugins that I have adapted as well as a full detail of NagiosGrapher config files with examples, etc.

*that last part might take awhile, as I am still learning it!

–begin rant–

Please explain to me why you would not release a new version when you have 156 patches that must be applied.

–end rant–

I just installed vim on 4 machines today and it was rather annoying.. So i thought I’d complain about it.

Among other things I now have my external monitoring system working as well as a few clients up.  Now it’s just time to move into salesman mode and pray nothing goes wrong

Well I finally had some time to sit down and configure my Efficient 5851 SDSL modems in a back to back fashion.

I have them working great when connected via a patch cable.  Tomorrow the telco is finishing up my Dry Loop install and I should be able to just connect them at both locations and they’ll still work .. So let’s hope.

The maximum speed I can achieve on these modems is 1152 kbps which will work for now and will give me time to get my tower up so that I can do a wireless backhaul.

I am unsure of the actual speed I will get due to the distance of my two locations but we’ll find that out soon enough and if it’s too slow to support clients then I will be working on getting my tower up as quickly as possible or looking into solutions that will bond multiple dry pairs since I can get these pairs rather cheap it might be more cost effective than trying to get the tower put up at this time..

Well the day is finally here and it comes at the perfect time. School starts Monday and I finished up today. All the classroom computers work, the network is 100% functional, and I have documentation of everything. Today has left me with the biggest feeling of success since I started the job. This means that I will go to work at 7:30 and be able to leave at 3:30 every day.. that is just wonderful. I thought many times that I wouldn’t be able to make the deadline with everything that kept getting added to my agenda.. but in the end everything worked out great!

Also, my T1 will be delivered very soon, and I go to finalize all my insurance needs on Monday so I am ready to start installing customers whenever the get the backbone put into place..

As far as notes about the servers I will be working on that.. I am going to try and setup a wiki for some public info or just so I can put tech stuff up that I don’t want to forget or search for/learn twice.. I got that idea from a great book. I recommend it for anyone that manages IT for a living.. “Time Management for System Administrators” by Thomas A. Limoncelli the tagline at the top of the cover is “Stop Working Late and Start Working Smart” and it’s perfect!

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..

On Monday I plan on ordering my equipment to test out my area.  My plan is to establish a 5GHz backhaul link from my house to the water tower in town to feed off the T1 that I will have at my house or Basestation.  The link will be 3.787 miles which should so VERY good bandwidth rates.  Once the PtP link is setup I will be using 2.4GHz equipment for the PtMP links.  I’ll update on how it all works in a couple weeks hopefully.  Wish me luck!