Home Server

[Lady Maven]

OK, I am not 100% sure I am using the correct term, but I want to be my own ISP. Has anyone done this? Is it worth it? Is it prohibitively expensive?

Talk tech to me baby.

[Connor]

How much bandwidth are you talking about selling to how many people and how geographically distributed are they?

Setting up as a commercial ADSL provider is pretty expensive - but if you're talking about on-selling wireless internet connections to people who live relatively close to you - that's not super difficult.

[MoP]

Hmmm, what are you trying to accomplish?

You'd need to buy the equipment ISPs have, rent a high speed back haul link (copper or fiber) to a bandwidth wholesaler, obtain a whole block of IP addresses (which are becoming expensive, as they're running out(on IPv4 at least)) and you have to meet certain legal requirements.

If you just want to sell internet to your neighbours you'd basically only need a decent router and an internet connection. But being your own ISP? I never really considered that, but it seems like a crazy idea (even here in Belgium, with the most expensive internet and telecom prices in the world).

[Nagash]

Why would you want to do that?

[owly]

Why would you want to do that?

i say porn what other reason could there be........

[Teanos]

Agree with the question "why would you want to do that?"

I know people in that industry and they want out. Huge money sink and no return.

[Lady Maven]

I was not considering selling it. I meant just for my own use. See.. I KNEW I was using the wrong terminology..

I just mean I want to get online with my own equipment and not have to pay anyone or assume the Fox viewing position to use free WiFi

[Teanos]

Oh, ok. So in otherwords right now you are either doing one of the following:

1.) Paying Verizon, Comcast, Roadrunner, or some other internet provider to give you Cable/DSL internet access.
a.) You are renting the modem and possibly router from them, thus paying $5-$20 a month in addition to the service.


2.) You are leaching/using internet access from a neighbor or public building that is near your house and thus do not currently have any sort of internet access into your building.

Honestly you only have one real option:

1.) Unfortunately you have to pay an ISP to provide you with internet. Short of doing it yourself as we originally thought, and quite frankly that is going to cost you much more money then $20 a month for Verizon basic DSL (T1 lines, etc. are easily several hundred to thousand a month) - you don't have much choice. You have to pay someone some place, or leach/borrow/steal it.

However you can buy your own modem. Best Buy and even Walmart sell them now. CISCO makes a ton of DSL/Cable modem pieces, all you have to do is figure out what type of internet you have and then buy the piece that works with it. If you do have an interent provider, call them and ask them what they recommend. You don't have to rent the equipment for them.

Once you got the modem out of the way (basically that takes the signal going into your house through the phone line or cable and converts it into something that your computer can use) you will want to get some sort of router. Some modem units come with built in 5 port switch/routers, that even do wifi. You can just about buy anything here, again CSCO makes a bunch of different devices under its "Linksys" brand. I prefer netgear myself.

Just buy a router with built in wifi, hook it up and hook your computers to it. The wifi can be used for laptops, iphones, nintendo Wii's...etc.

[Lady Maven]

Cool, and actually depending on where I am typing from (right now I just got done working out and using the pool so I am in the rec center) I do both 1 and 2.

Man, I was afraid it was going to cost too much. Buying my own modem sounds like a smart plan though. Do you know much about them? For instance if I decide to switch from cable to dsl would I need a different modem?

[Connor]

What he said.

That said, if you're looking to get a bit more performance out of your solution, and you're paranoid about your data privacy - I have a couple of other comments - both of which require some geeking to make work properly.

I'm not close enough to come around to your house and maintain it for you or anything - but I try and make my friends who are buying new modem/routers buy from this list or this list and install the improved firmware for them.

If you've got someone geeky to help you or you're comfortable with geeking out a bit to get it all set-up, I think the improvement is spectacular. If you get into things like replacing the retail antenna with a better quality antenna - the improvements can be amazing. But it's a bit nerd heavy for most home users.

I'm unreasonably concerned with data privacy at the moment, because the Australian Government is fucking retarded - so I'm a big fan of services like this - international, private VPN's that don't keep records. TorrentFreedom's implementation is the best priced and most legitimately secure solution I know of at the moment. Some other companies like iPREDator are a bit better known - but I don't like most of them because their solutions aren't actually that good at securing your privacy.

For instance if I decide to switch from cable to dsl would I need a different modem?

Usually yes.

[Lady Maven]

I am software. I mean I CAN geek out on hardware, but mostly software. I do have friends who are hardware geeks though. I was in a video programming course and doing freaking GOOD, but a real job in the industry required I go where those jobs are, had a tentative offer in Japan, but then my step son was diagnosed with leukemia, my mother in law lost her fucking mind (literally) and I had a grandchild, so no moving for Maven

edit/ The government here doesn't care what I am doing, and I don't care if they see it. I post a pick of my ass in a file marked SECRET just in case they DO look. But unless they are REALLY into spinning wool into yarn, that is about all they will find.

I keep my porn in hard copy.

[Connor]

edit/ The government here doesn't care what I am doing, and I don't care if they see it.

It's not really the possibility of the govt looking at my files that bothers me. It's more the imminent likelihood in Australia that the government is going to be very concerned about my network traffic and restricting where I can go and what I can read, and recording the details of what I do actually read after that. And currently, there's not much threat of that happening in the US.

The paranoia response for US types is avoiding data discrimination policies by using a network neutral VPN provider. That's a really geeky story - but Comcast has already screwed bittorrent users, and there's an ongoing argument about weather or not ISP's can double bill for bandwidth or take parental control of your internet traffic to make doing naughty things slow. a VPN through a neutral network provider doesn't necessarily avoid the issue - but it elliminates your ISP's ability to be sneaky about it. They either cripple your internet entirely, which is bad for their business, or they leave you alone.

It's really a paranoia thing at the moment. But I think the next 18 months will see a huge spike in people using VPN services unless government finally learns enough about technology to slap would be monopolists away from screwing consumers.

[Lady Maven]

Believe me Connor, at my age doing naughty things is already slow. The days of hanging from a swing and bounding off a headboard are comming to an end.

I thought Australia was pretty much like we are and even more so? What I mean is I thought that ya'll were WAY into personal freedom, history not withstanding.

[Connor]

Heh - We have no assured rights to freedom of speech or free access to literature. As a social group - our primary cultural phillosophies support thos freedoms, but as a political entity - the way our electoral seats are dispersed places a disproportionate ammount of power in the hands of a relatively small number of farmers who don't know what the intarwebs does except let pedophiles hunt children, own shares in Rupert Murdoch's media empire, are strongly christian (mostly catholic) and are so conservative and change resistant that they haven't made up their minds about fire yet.

So there are proposals on the table to apply a mandatory internet filter with no opt out that would filter in various proposals
A) everything that hasn't been submitted to the australian office of film and litterature classification for a rating and everything rated above MA (there is no R or X rating in Australia for digital material, only kids use computers apparently) or
B)all material refused classification by the OFLC (which includes kiddy porn, but also includes a lot of stuff that isn't illegal to own or sell in Australia, they leave that bit out and focus on the kiddy porn when they lie to the cameras), or
C) A black list of content that would never be released to the public, only ISP's - because they'll never leak. They neglect to mention that every other country that has ever implemented any kind of black list 'to save the children' has used it to suppress political opposition. Including countries where the blacklist was legislated to ONLY apply to kiddy porn and there was no possible way to mistake an opposition advertising campaign for fucking kiddy porn.

Needless to say - I think these are ridiculous and I've been writing letters and promoting awareness of this ludicrous bullshit fairly vigorously to other australian voters for 2 years now, since I first became aware of the policies.

The newest policy is in addition to the above, the government is trying to sneak through a requirement for ISP's to record the full contents of all emails sent or recieved by Australians and track and permanently record all URL's visited by people using HTTP and HTTPS and all domains visited by people using other protocols. Because divorced dads deserve to be denied access to their children if they look at porn while the kid is at mum's place.

Also, you now have to declare if you hve any kind of pornography on your laptop when coming through the border. If you do - customs have the right to seize your laptop and take a copy of the harddrive - so that video of you and your wife on holiday in Bali? Now a part of the public record and in the hands of customs officials who promise they won't put it on the internet. If you fail to declare and the customs agents decide to take a look at your laptop - you may face federal charges for being in posession of such a video.

Pornography is also a subjective interpretation under australian law. A video of your kids naked on the beach could well be considered pornography and indeed child pornography if the customs agent interprets it to be sexual. You'd then face not only a failure to declare, but child porn charges and permanent residence on the sex offender registry and quite possibly the increased sentancing implications of being a sex tourist because you recorded child pornography off shore. I hope you never want to work anywhere that does police checks, travel overseas or go a week without having your windows bricked again.

[Lady Maven]

Fascinating.

Now what would happen if you decided to do what I thought I could and set up your own server? Would that be regulated as well?

[Nagash]

Pornography is also a subjective interpretation under australian law. A video of your kids naked on the beach could well be considered pornography and indeed child pornography if the customs agent interprets it to be sexual. You'd then face not only a failure to declare, but child porn charges and permanent residence on the sex offender registry and quite possibly the increased sentancing implications of being a sex tourist because you recorded child pornography off shore. I hope you never want to work anywhere that does police checks, travel overseas or go a week without having your windows bricked again.

You're kidding, right? I'm all for sentencing paedophiles to death by choking on their own, freshly cut off, balls. But this is ridiculous.

[Connor]

Fascinating.

Now what would happen if you decided to do what I thought I could and set up your own server? Would that be regulated as well?

Yep. The practical way to get around it is a foreign VPN service - but it's still unclear how legal those will be if they don't filter results - so if I then resold that service commercially in Australia I'd be comitting a crime. Which will be interesting since lots of international businesses use VPN's for their domestic locations.

You're kidding, right?

Nope. Australia is fucked up. We have an election coming up in August, but the current govt. has shelved this policy for a year - which means if they get back in (and if they still need the votes from a few super conservatives in the senate) it'll be wheeled back out and they'll announce that their re-election is a mandate from the people to protect our children from the intarwebs. If the other primary party gets in, they're planning to scrap the major infrastructure developments that the current government is putting in - which will actually get broadband speeds here out of third world status. Yay.

[Nagash]

That is fucked up indeed. Ever considered allowing the British governance over Australia again?

[Connor]

That is fucked up indeed. Ever considered allowing the British governance over Australia again?

not really, no.

[Gili]

jesus, even us brits don't want the british government most of the time Why on earth would others want them.