Ask Slashdot: Management Software For Small Independent ISP?

First time accepted submitter Vorknkx writes "I work in a small ISP. Most of our customers have cable modems but some of them are using Canopy or Ubiquity products. To manage all that, we're using a number of programs and solutions not necessarily made for such a task that are kept up to date simply using copy and paste. We have an Access database for all our internet customers, an Excel document for our wireless users, The Dude to monitor every user and a custom-made web application to monitor traffic. Needless to say, we're starting to hit the limit and juggling between all these programs is a complete pain. Is there some kind of all-in-one solution that would allow us to eliminate all the copy and paste while keeping the same functionality?"

LAMP

[Anonymous Coward]

Just build yourself a LAMP setup, with workers feeding a database, and web GUI to access/update.
Sync data from other sources into that, to provide a single converged view of whatever item (customer, router, location, network link...whatever). (Don't forget copious use of memcache btw)

Trust me....this works really well and scales to millions of customers :-)

Re:LAMP

[Morpf]

Or go LAPP and use PostgreSQL instead of MySQL. ;)
But either way: Try to automate all recurring tasks, try to make all information necessary for one job visible from one spot.

There are commercial apps for this

[laffer1]

There are commercial apps for ISPs to manage customers. When I worked for a dial-up/isdn/t1 service provide about 12 years ago, we used Platypus.

We used it both for customer service / billing and technical support. It had a windows client and a web client and used Microsoft SQL server on the backend.

Even a help desk software package could help. The great thing about Platypus is that it could handle all the credit card and billing stuff too. You might also look at HEAT or Remedy for just keeping a customer database and doing tech support.

ISP management

[ruir]

I was in your position some years ago. I also know that our main operator wasted millions in Incognito software just to throw it away, and ended up paying millions to Microsoft. Obvious not the average "small ISP", but I hope you get across my point. Small/medium ISPs end up writing their own custom software, because there is not a specialized/vertical package that works as it should. I ended up doing that too, and connecting my software to a in-house developed ERP package. Check my profile in linked.in. Regards, http://pt.linkedin.com/pub/rui-ribeiro/16/ab8/434/ [linkedin.com]

Indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

Google is running hundreds of millions of customers on a MySQL Sharded Cluster. That means a hash function maps each email address onto one of 100 physical database servers. That means easy scaling.