[discuss] Re: ISP suggestions?

[Russell McOrmond]

Andrew Kohlsmith wrote:
> ?  It's hard to find anyone offering strictly shells these days, much less 
> Canadian.  You're more likely to find colocation facilities or virtual 
> hosting, either of which would work very well.  Virtual servers are very 
> inexpensive and would give him everything he's looking for.  Narrowing it 
> down to Canadian-owned is the trick.

   All agreed.

   I was previously more involved in the ISP business, now only doing 
sysadmin work for others such as http://www.openconcept.ca.   People 
want shell accounts practically for free, and yet is is relatively 
expensive to offer.   It's cheaper for the ISP to get more powerful 
hardware, run virtualization, and offer customers root on their own 
virtual box.

   I'm doing a fair bit of work with Xen these days towards this.  While 
other virtualization exists, I really want it to be FLOSS and to be more 
robust than what UML offered.

   There are problems in the current version that are being worked out 
(some bugs in the xennet "virtual ethernet" driver  - RedHat is right 
about the "readyness" of Xen), but this is extremely promising. 
OpenConcept will likely be offering this commercially in the new year, 
and is based in Ottawa (within the Storm collocation facility, but with 
more than just Storm connectivity).


   OpenConcept is intended by its owner to be an entirely FLOSS based shop.

-- 
  Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/>
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