Hi All
There have been alot of e-mails on the list this year (from myself aswell) relating to the Internet in Israel. Every ISP promises that they are the fastest, have the best support, when often nothing can be further from the truth. An ISP / infrastructure provider will be having technical problems that affect all users, but to cover their ass they'll waste your time trying to find a non existant problem on your PC. In most other countries, you have independant sites which keep such companies in line, and I'd like your help in setting one up for Israel. I foresee a number of parts of such a site: 1) A WIKI which will include 1a) General information on each ISP, including hopefully maps showing their connections and bandwidth both locally and abroad (is this info available anywhere??) 1b) Debugging information for ADSL modems, cable, etc, to help people help themselves, and help users/us perform our own diagnostics before having to waste time on the phone with support. 1c) Of course, plenty of Linux information... both rating ISPs according to their linux support, and of course offering scripts and other info. There's already a page on using openl2tpd to connect via HOT -- this seems to the best and most actively maintained l2tp package, and the info is all from 2007 and not 2001 like other guides. 2) RATINGS OF THE ISPS and infrastructure providers 2a) Subjective ratings: users will be able to rate from 1-10 on issues such as speed, support, stability, etc. 2b) Objecting ratings: linux scripts that will run daily or even hourly performing latency, bandwidth and maybe even traceroute tests to various selected sites in Israel and abroad, and automatically submit this data to a script on the site which will show ISP aggregates, graphs, etc... 2c) In both cases, we'll a) see the real numbers and not the ISPs opinion of how good they are, and secondly we'll be able to tell objectively if an ISP is experiencing a problem instead of relying on their word. 3) Finally, I guess a forum for discussion of Israeli internet. Obviously this is quite a big endeavor and nothing I can do on my own, but I think it's something that would be really worthwhile for the community here and benefit everyone (i.e. once the ISPs have real competition to deliver on their promises). The wiki is set up, although as you can see there's not much there now (www.mybroadband.co.il). Feel free to add, edit, change, re-order, etc, anything on the site, without asking me. It's a community site, I just want to get things started. My forte is PHP, so I can handle all the rating scripts, etc... as for (2c) I can handle the server side, but it would be great if someone else could write a shell script to perform the actual tests, and I'll handle processing and maybe laying out of the submitted data. Anyway, for those who want to be more involved than just editing stuff on the wiki, you're invited to send an email with the word 'subscribe' in the subject or body of the message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] List information and future archives will go here: http://lists.mybroadband.co.il/mailman/listinfo/devel. Feel free to post something, again, this is a project for all of those motivated to do it, nothing depends on me. Please also feel free to forward this message to other relevant lists you're subscribed to, especially if they're in Hebrew (which isn't my forte... although I hope most parts of the site will finally be available in atleast English and Hebrew, and maybe more). Feel free to translate this message. Kol tov Gadi --- Gadi Cohen aka Kinslayer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> www.wastelands.net Freelance admin/coding/design HABONIM DROR linux/fantasy enthusiast KeyID 0x93F26EF5: 256A 1FC7 AA2B 6A8F 1D9B 6A5A 4403 F34B 93F2 6EF5
