Surferz.net - An (almost all) OpenBSD ISP

Surferz is a small dial-up ISP with web and associated irc services in Upstate NY. The company started in 1999 in Catskill NY. The company specializes in small town tech support intensive dial-up service.

At first we used linux, then experimented with NetBSD. After the sysadmin tried OpenBSD on a home firewall/NAT box we moved to OpenBSD first with the Nameservers, then the webserver and finally the radius and mail servers. Since we changed operating systems we have had very good uptime with few problems.

Recently we moved our overworked Cisco 5300 to being just an access server and installed an OpenBSD as our headend router. Under heavy network traffic the Cisco would have processor usages of 80-90%. So far things have been running very smoothly with the BSD router which has a processor usage of %10 under thw same load that overloaded the Cisco. All our business offices are behind OpenBSD NAT boxes.

Our Dialup access servers are Cisco 5200's and 5300's and we have a couple of Cisco 2600's that connect our business office to our main NOC. Eventually we hope to do office to office connects with OpenBSD and LMC (SBEI) Wan cards. I have read the source code for the card and am very impressed.

For the first 3 years of surferz Marina Brown was the sole qualified sysadmin. Now we are privileged to have Lurene Grenier as a part time tech support person. She will be adding a snort IDS to watch for hostile activity.

Per the request from snort folks i have added this link to current snort resources to this page.

a cheat sheet for Snort - https://comparite.ch/snort-cs

We will add custom PF rules for our colocated servers and provide a special discount for any OpenBSD developer. There is an ENTIRE empty rack that wants to be filled. Our rates are posted at http://www.intellhost.com.

MRTG Traffic Graphs