4 ms·

I too ran a small ISP from 1995-1997 or so, and the biggest gift I got from one of my co-founders was the strong suggestion we use this new cheap database calle

by dgacmu 3y ago

I too ran a small ISP from 1995-1997 or so, and the biggest gift I got from one of my co-founders was the strong suggestion we use this new cheap database called mSQL [1] as the basis of our accounting system. And I did. I wrote a lot of terrible, undergrad-in-cs C code around it, but we never messed up on billing. Thanks, Kent! Now that time I hadn't verified that our backups were working and lost all of our data, that was a little less good. [1] not a typo, it still exists, though I doubt anyone would use it over MySQL, postgres, or sqlite. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSQL https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSQL

manicennui 3y ago
mSQL was my first introduction to open source databases as well.
300bps 3y ago
Me too! Although I did web hosting and company ISDN lines and not dialup 1996-1998. Used Windows NT for web hosting and Slackware Linux with qmail for mail hosting. Sold out at what I thought was the top - which was a year or two too early but that's OK.
- Aschebescher 3y ago
  A lot better than one year late, I guess.
- nyrikki 3y ago
  We did our billing with great plains accounting software which still exists as Microsoft Dynamics GP. When 56k came around you had to do ISDN, but for many rural ISPs the tariffs for ISDN was cost prohibitive so POTS was the only option. I worked for a few ISPs and negotiated telcos to bring in redundant OC12s to support the need, allowing them to use our data centers for the local switching. We never needed that capacity ourselves, but as it was before they started using multiple colors per fiber that was the smallest they would run. I also started out with stacks of external modems and NT RAS. I remember that the plastic on stacked modems would blacken due to heat in about 6 months. I dealt with sendmail, bind, etc and didn't do the account provisioning but it was written in Delphi. As I had written an entire 7 digit double entry accounting system in college in two weeks backed by dbase, this stories excel and paper based system seems like an anomaly for the time. NT we hosting was a pain, but front page did make it a popular option you had to support. While I did introduce Linux, we were mostly on DEC Alphastations because you could support a lot more load for less money than the sun boxes at the time. It was a fun time. I remember hopping on #nanog on irc because I couldn't get uunet support to pull routs from us and had them pulling from us in less than an hour.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - toast0 3y ago
    > NT we hosting was a pain, but front page did make it a popular option you had to support. I don't remember the details, but at the micro-ISP I worked at, I got frontpage extensions working on Apache for customers. We had two T1s, one for upstream, one for modems (which I never got to play with), we also contracted out nationwide dialup through megapath? or someone... We ran a radius auth server and they did the rest. Some java accounting package; I did an integration for ach billing, and made a module so we could sell domains (via Tucows OpenSRS). At some point, the modem T1 stopped working and we couldn't get the telco to fix it, so we had to move all the customers to the outsourced dialup provider, which wasn't great for the business... I left because of scheduling/poor performance at school and they got purchased by a customer.
daft_pink 3y ago
I was living in the Chicago and got one of the first DSL lines during the dot com bubble. It took 6 months to get it installed. They never charged us for it. Roughly a year later, we got a letter from their big four accounting firm saying that they were going bankrupt due to billing irregularities and our service would be terminated soon, but it was easy to get service then. We never paid a dime for it.
- grogenaut 3y ago
  We were in the first 100 customers to get dsl in STL. It took 1.5 years and escalating to a vice president to get it to work as both a phone line and dsl. Their billing system was miffed as dsl was commercial. My friends worked there and had oracle access (swbell) and could easily see the mismatch, but couldn't fix it. They ended up giving us our old dialup second phone line for free and dsl for free for 3 years to solve it. Wife also worked for att and dsl was cheap for them except the billing system swore my apt was in another county and would send the installers there constantly. Took 8 months and was only fixed when wife went on a tour of a facility and mentioned it to an engineer and their VP.
- organsnyder 3y ago
  Early DSL was such a shitshow. We went through two or three providers going under before it finally began to stabilize.
  - giantrobot 3y ago
    In 2000 or thereabouts PacBell was promising ADSL at my apartment. I was well within range of the CO/DSLAM and everything seemed set but the technician could not get the modem to sync with a signal. Turned out the building's phone wiring was a rat's nest of twisted and taped RJ-11. It really sucked not to get anything faster than dial-up. It also explained why my dial-up couldn't connect reliably at 28k and I'd often be stuck with a 19k connection. The experience did teach me a lot about Squid as a caching proxy and using wget and screen to do overnight downloads (I didn't learn about whey's background flag until a few years later).

by dgacmu 3y ago

manicennui 3y ago

mSQL was my first introduction to open source databases as well.

300bps 3y ago

Me too! Although I did web hosting and company ISDN lines and not dialup 1996-1998. Used Windows NT for web hosting and Slackware Linux with qmail for mail hosting. Sold out at what I thought was the top - which was a year or two too early but that's OK.

Aschebescher 3y ago
A lot better than one year late, I guess.
nyrikki 3y ago
We did our billing with great plains accounting software which still exists as Microsoft Dynamics GP. When 56k came around you had to do ISDN, but for many rural ISPs the tariffs for ISDN was cost prohibitive so POTS was the only option. I worked for a few ISPs and negotiated telcos to bring in redundant OC12s to support the need, allowing them to use our data centers for the local switching. We never needed that capacity ourselves, but as it was before they started using multiple colors per fiber that was the smallest they would run. I also started out with stacks of external modems and NT RAS. I remember that the plastic on stacked modems would blacken due to heat in about 6 months. I dealt with sendmail, bind, etc and didn't do the account provisioning but it was written in Delphi. As I had written an entire 7 digit double entry accounting system in college in two weeks backed by dbase, this stories excel and paper based system seems like an anomaly for the time. NT we hosting was a pain, but front page did make it a popular option you had to support. While I did introduce Linux, we were mostly on DEC Alphastations because you could support a lot more load for less money than the sun boxes at the time. It was a fun time. I remember hopping on #nanog on irc because I couldn't get uunet support to pull routs from us and had them pulling from us in less than an hour.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- toast0 3y ago
  > NT we hosting was a pain, but front page did make it a popular option you had to support. I don't remember the details, but at the micro-ISP I worked at, I got frontpage extensions working on Apache for customers. We had two T1s, one for upstream, one for modems (which I never got to play with), we also contracted out nationwide dialup through megapath? or someone... We ran a radius auth server and they did the rest. Some java accounting package; I did an integration for ach billing, and made a module so we could sell domains (via Tucows OpenSRS). At some point, the modem T1 stopped working and we couldn't get the telco to fix it, so we had to move all the customers to the outsourced dialup provider, which wasn't great for the business... I left because of scheduling/poor performance at school and they got purchased by a customer.

daft_pink 3y ago

I was living in the Chicago and got one of the first DSL lines during the dot com bubble. It took 6 months to get it installed. They never charged us for it. Roughly a year later, we got a letter from their big four accounting firm saying that they were going bankrupt due to billing irregularities and our service would be terminated soon, but it was easy to get service then. We never paid a dime for it.

grogenaut 3y ago
We were in the first 100 customers to get dsl in STL. It took 1.5 years and escalating to a vice president to get it to work as both a phone line and dsl. Their billing system was miffed as dsl was commercial. My friends worked there and had oracle access (swbell) and could easily see the mismatch, but couldn't fix it. They ended up giving us our old dialup second phone line for free and dsl for free for 3 years to solve it. Wife also worked for att and dsl was cheap for them except the billing system swore my apt was in another county and would send the installers there constantly. Took 8 months and was only fixed when wife went on a tour of a facility and mentioned it to an engineer and their VP.
organsnyder 3y ago
Early DSL was such a shitshow. We went through two or three providers going under before it finally began to stabilize.
- giantrobot 3y ago
  In 2000 or thereabouts PacBell was promising ADSL at my apartment. I was well within range of the CO/DSLAM and everything seemed set but the technician could not get the modem to sync with a signal. Turned out the building's phone wiring was a rat's nest of twisted and taped RJ-11. It really sucked not to get anything faster than dial-up. It also explained why my dial-up couldn't connect reliably at 28k and I'd often be stuck with a 19k connection. The experience did teach me a lot about Squid as a caching proxy and using wget and screen to do overnight downloads (I didn't learn about whey's background flag until a few years later).