Setting up an ISP with Apple Gear

[JamesT2]

Gents,

I have recently converted to Mac Book Pro and wish I had done it years ago, my pc days are truly over, Me and my family are much more productive now thanks to apple.

I am looking to convert my existing RHE3 isp over to apple xserve, I run a proven e-commerce solution with live customers turning over good cash flow thanks to my turnkey service, which has been built using Opensource (I have donated a lot of money to this cause over the years).

I need experts to discuss setting up an ISP with apple gear, I will have my own co-location in austria and Uk providing services for the SMB market, I will also like to discuss with good individuals any experience they have had with topics such as control panels, email, anti relaying, security, virtual hosting, ip tunneling and the overall adminsitration experience.

I am grateful for any assistance relating to this subject whether it be reference material, personal overviews which are agnostic and fair.

Thanks in advance

[ksv]

In short, the Xserve doesn't serve very well as a web server. Common server software is often more optimised for FreeBSD and Linux on x86 based systems.

There is an anandtech review comparing a G5 to two Xeons and an Opteron in a server setup:
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2436

Especially MySQL runs significantly faster on Linux systems.

What I recommend, and am going to do with my own company, is to run Fedora Core 5 on Conroe based server hardware once that appears on the market.

Here's a nice guide on how to set up Fedora Core 5:
http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect_setup_fedora_core_5

And cpanel is a nice ISP administration tool:
http://www.cpanel.com/

Cpanel installs all the needed software if I remember correctly, so you wouldn't have to bother with the tutorial above if you go for Cpanel.

[nixgeek]

This is interesting. I wonder what the Xserves will be like once their running Leopard Server (if it comes out) on the Woodcrest (or possibly Cloverton) CPUs? Is Apple still going to produce Xserves? It would be nice if they could get behind that while supporting various other server operating systems as well (including Windows Server if needed).

Just a thought to consider...

[JamesT2]

Thanks for your reponse, I can see that the OSX is weak on latency but is made up for in the distribution of moving data, I will see if I can find scalability stats to see how this affects user usage levels.

I have looked fedora and although it looks great will take a ot of tweaking to get it right, I had a lot trouble trying to identify the correct hardware config to have it install succesfully without getting into kernel rebuilds, this was one reason why I chose RHE3, I was drawn to the OSX for its admin tweaks, I think as always there is a trade off with this area and although I wont hit mass market sell it as cheap as I can type hosting, I am more of a specialist and I can fit 50 customers on one box then it will be profitable, however the last thing anyone wants is a performance issue with regards to databse read writes which my sites are based on.

Great start and a great help

[JamesT2]

wonder if intel dual core will help them to improve...

Interesting lin k that argues against... http://www.apple.com/xserve/performance.html

[Captain Code]

I think you should wait and see how Leopard performs before making any decision if you can wait that long. If they're really replacing the OS X kernel with their own like some rumors suggest it could improve performance a lot, especially on the new Intel hardware.

[nixgeek]

Originally Posted by Captain Code

I think you should wait and see how Leopard performs before making any decision if you can wait that long. If they're really replacing the OS X kernel with their own like some rumors suggest it could improve performance a lot, especially on the new Intel hardware.

Of course, that would probably mean that they will close up the source to Darwin, but that's a topic for another thread. I hope they keep it open though, in the spirit of open source support that they initially began with.

[Captain Code]

Maybe but if they're not using it then I can't see Apple continuing to update it. I guess they can let people do whatever they would like with it if they did replace it with something else.