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On 12/06/13 08:53, Gordon Henderson wrote: > And if you must have a ticketing system, go out and buy a solution, > don't cobble it together with a crapppy old Linux box Well, yes and no. I agree that for an ongoing commercial solution, a £450 outlay for a neat, tailored and supported (very important!) device to do most of the work for you is a no-brainer. I certainly wouldn't consider it cost-effective to bother implementing a ticketing system myself from scratch. But if you don't already have something else suitable in place in your general network infrastructure, a crappy linux box is *exactly* what you're going to need for the more dirty hands-on dirty side of it - i.e., the networking. Any half competent person can immediately implement all the mangling, QOS, proxying, caching, rate limiting, site filtering and even blocking of abusive customers that you'll ever need, and which your crappy ISP provided router almost definitely won't do properly, if at all. I would actually use OpenBSD/pf for this out of choice, rather than Linux/iptables, but either will do. Just make sure you've got a spare one ready to drop straight in at a moments notice if your old P4 based network box blows its 15 year old PSU in the middle of a busy bank holiday weekend... Regards -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq