Questions & Answers

Question: How do I account for users' activities?

Answer: BSDI's accounting includes connect time (per user), CPU seconds (per user and per process), disk usage (with disk quotas), and complete WWW accounting (hits/page along with complete list of which users are accessing your server's pages).

Question: Can I host multiple domain names on a single computer?

Answer: Yes, you can target as many domain names to one system as you wish. Likewise, a single system can have multiple IP addresses. There is, however, a mitigating factor. When sending mail from a system with multiple domain names, the system administrator must create a rule to specify which domain name is shown as the return address.

Question: Can I host WWW pages for multiple domains/names?

Answer: Yes.

Question: How do I get domain names and an IP address?

Answer: The Network Information Center (NIC) is the central administration authority for names and IP addresses. You can fill out one of their forms and submit it (electronically, catch-22) or have your ISP do it for you (the usual case).

Question: I'm worried about my system's security. What should I do?

Answer: First of all, be sure you have something to worry about. If you're running a public-access bulletin board system, you don't care if people steal all your data (it's public, anyway). You do care if people can `hack' your machine and change information or deny service, of course.

BSDI's systems have a sterling reputation in the security community. BSDI strives to maintain this reputation by fixing bugs as soon as they are reported.

Question: My management says that they won't connect our system to the Internet where college students can hack our MIS database.

Answer: Your management is being prudent! You might be able to gain great leverage from a `firewall'. A firewall system sits between your network and the Internet and monitors every packet that goes by. Packets that do not meet specific security requirements are discarded. This keeps `hackers' from entering your internal network and wreaking havoc. The ftp site ftp.tis.com has a set of security tools to construct a firewall using a BSD/OS system. Recent experiences show that it takes about two person-days to construct and configure a firewall using this technique.

Question: I see BSDI sells source code. Do I need source code?

Answer: Most customers do not require source code. Those who desire it cite several reasons: they are not dependent on anyone when they run into an emergency, they can modify the code to meet their specific advanced requirements, and they feel `warm and fuzzy' when they have the source code.

Question: My ISP is charging me 10x as much as my neighbor for network bandwidth. Why is he cheating me?

Answer: He's probably not cheating you. If your neighbor is a small business or non-ISP business, he's probably using only a tiny fraction of the network bandwidth capacity afforded him. Your bandwidth provider is charging you for the resources you'll be using, particularly the valuable pipeline to the Internet. It is important, of course, for you to notify your bandwidth supplier that you are reselling the bandwidth. Otherwise, you might find yourself with only 10% of what you had anticipated.

Question: What software do the customers use on their computer?

Answer: Your customers will either dialin to your computer using ProComm any other ASCII modem/dialin program or they will use SLIP or PPP to establish a full TCP/IP connection. BSDI is negotiating with another vendor that offers TCP/IP-like connectivity in a serial-line environment but has not yet completed those negotiations.

ASCII dialin users typically see a `glass teletype', often with 24 lines of 80 characters each. They use the dialin/modem program to access megabytes of netnews in addition to exchanging personal e-mail, chatting in hundreds of `chat groups' on IRC, and surfing the World Wide Web via `lynx' - the non-graphic WWW interface. Since it has no pictures (and concomitant transfer overhead), lynx offers much snappier performance than full-blown graphic World Wide Web browsers. Lynx is also reputed to have a `gopher' interface.

ASCII dialin users can also move files with a combination of ftp (from the Internet to the ISP machine) and then zmodem to their machine.

Customers who want full TCP/IP connectivity (which is pretty much required for graphics) need a SLIP or PPP software package. Internet-in-a-box is a typical product that offers SLIP or PPP connectivity. Once they have connectivity, they can exploit a full graphic WWW/Mosaic browser (e.g., transferred from the ftp archives of NCSA at University of Illinois), NCSA Telnet to login to other systems (also available from ftp archives at UI), and NCSA ftp to move files from other systems (available likewise). They'll probably use either ASCII dailup or NCSA telnet to read mail and netnews on your machine - so TCP/IP connectivity doesn't fully relieve your machine of providing services besides `routing'. The NCSA programs are available, to the best of my knowledge, for both Macintoshes and PCs and are provided with no charges.

Some newer products and offerings enable voice or even video to be transmitted in real-time across the net. These products will saturate your network link's bandwidth so quickly as to be amazing. BSDI is still studying the impact of these products and does not yet recommend their use other than in the context of a technology demonstration.

Question: How much impact is a newsfeed on my system?

Answer: As of early 1995, A UUNET-sized ``full'' newsfeed is ~120K articles/day, with about 300MB of data for 100% of the articles (not all sites collect 100% of the articles). The folks over at UUNET, perhaps the USA's largest feeder of news, use a 48MB Pentium-90 with 3GB of disk to feed 30 sites (i.e., 3,600,000 articles a day, total of 9GB of newsfeed per day).

A 128MB Pentium-90 with extra disk buffers can feed over 40 sites per day.

Conclusion? A big newsfeed takes only a small percentage of your machine, presuming that you have enough RAM and disk I/O bandwidth available.