Internet Café Setup

dod

I have a few questions that some of you people familiar with the setup of Internet Cafes may be able to answer. I’ve had a trawl through Google and haven’t found much useful information on the technical and other requirements for setting up an Internet Café from scratch. I suspect that there are no canonical answers to many questions, but your guidance/ experience/ what-you-would-do-differently-were-you-doing-it-again would be useful. Please excuse any naïve questions. I would be grateful for any guidance you may have to offer, but these are the questions that have occurred to me thusfar.

Bandwidth/ Connection
What is an indication of the per-user up and down bandwidth in a good setup (I assume this is not simply a linear multiple based on user load)?
Do you use the Eircom/ Esat or do you use a specialist provider?
What connection failover arrangements are used?
Are there standard pipe-sizes and what is an indication of the number of users that the standard pipes will facilitate?
What are the peak load times for your connection, is a noticeable degradation acceptable to the users (I assume not), what are the applications/ user-types that result in higher connection traffic loads?

Gateway/ Firewall/ Virus
Without knowing a lot about it, I am guessing that the incoming Internet connection goes straight into a single, say, Linux box with all the firewall, antivirus, connection monitoring etc. on it. Then a ‘clean’ connection from the Linux box connects to a hub to which all the PCs in the café connect?
Do (should?) all the PCs have virus software installed on them individually?

Network design/ topology
What networking software do you recommend?
Are there any tradeoff considerations when selecting between network infrastructure choices?
What sort of cabling? What about wireless networking?
Is the hardware a basic 10/100 NIC in each of the PCs?

Hardware
What sort of spec PC- RAM, HDD, Chip speed etc. is typical?
Do you have higher spec PCs for heavy duty users, and lesser spec PCs for, say, someone who just wants to use Hotmail?
What sort of peripherals are typical- do all the PCs have scanners, webcams, speakers, headphones etc. attached as standard?
Do users have access to the CD drive, CD writer, zip drive etc.? How is this managed to prevent the malicious introduction of something destructive onto the system or the network?
What about allowing a user to introduce their own peripherals onto your system, e.g. if they should want to plug their handheld cradle into the USB port?

Operating Systems/ Applications
I assume the desktop OS most in demand is some flavour of Windows. Is there (non-trivial) demand for others e.g. a Linux desktop?
What is the tradeoff between allowing sufficient flexibility on the desktop application to facilitate the widest possible selection of users and locking it down to the extent that the user cannot make deleterious changes to the system setup?
Other than a web browser, is MS Office the most widely used application suite?
Do you only have IE, or do users require access to Mozilla, Opera etc.?
What other applications are used?
I assume there is demand for online gaming- are the games permanently installed on all the PCs and what (if any) are the licensing considerations in respect of this?
What games are must-haves?
What other applications are in demand?

Charging and Control
I am sure charging varies massively according to location and time of day- what are the sort of charges that people are used to paying? Are there any ‘special’ charging structures, e.g. midnight to 8am for a discounted fee?
What sort of control software is in place- is there central monitoring, recording & automatic charge calculation for workstation usage and what software is used for this?
I see net cafés varying in size from 5 to 50+ PCs, any views on what the minimum number of workstations makes a net café economically viable?

The Café part
I assume the Café part of the net café will vary from a basic Coke-fridge/ box of Mars bars to quite a sophisticated Café setup. How much space is devoted to purely café facilities and how much is PC space?
Are the Café facilities available constantly when the net café is open or only at given times of the day?

Physical security
I am assuming that there are instances of people trying to walk out with a mouse, a webcam, possibly even something more substantial- how is this controlled or managed?

AOB
What questions have I not thought of?

OK, sorry the post consists solely of such a long list of questions, but thanks in advance for any thoughts you may have.

Raz

I don't have much experience in the area but just 2 things I'd offer,

Do (should?) all the PCs have virus software installed on them individually?

I'd say yes, all PCs should have it. If a user downloads an *.exe file made in winzip (ie. an auto extract archive) it may contain malicious files that could get past the linux controller.

Do users have access to the CD drive, CD writer, zip drive etc.? How is this managed to prevent the malicious introduction of something destructive onto the system or the network?

A net café in temple bar that I know of keep a standard image that can be put back on a computer whenever something goes wrong with one. It basically starts writing over what's on the computer and doesn't stop until it has written over the whole hard drive so you start with a nice new clean system.

My 2c

str8_away

One question I think you should have asked:
How to stop people access ages limted site (porn)?

Capt'n Midnight

a) setup WiFi - customers bring thier own laptops.

b) you NEED monitoring sw - not sure on the legal position if something illegal is done and the IP points at you
- however most sensible people would go schizo if the saw a security camera pointing at them in a way that it could record keystrokes.

c) disk images - some cafe reimage PC's on a daily basis

d) Knoppix has a nice PXE server - diskless workstations

e) mice / keyboards - use cable ties ...

f) you have also to protect from trojans esp. keyboard loggers

g) CDRW - warez / uploads - dodgy legal stuff

h) need users to click on the AUP when login

i) www.squidguard.org

j) a transparent proxy is handy (with a big HDD)

k) one trick is to record google searches and then in the evening / morning re-do the most common searches and open all the links on the first page or two - pre-caching

l) you could sell floppies and have each PC's USB drive (15m cables) behind the counter so that they can't bring in their own floppies and they get handed the one they have written to

m) don't rip people off .....

damnyanks

Wi-Fi is very insecure. Saw an article some place about some guy going around London with a home made attena getting onto large coporation networks.

echomadman

OK, I went through all this in january.


Bandwidth/ Connection
Get the fastest DSL line you can in your area,
do *not* even consider Satellite.... (i wasted 500 bucks on that lame fsckaround)
If this isnt an otion yet get isdn and use very aggressive proxying (this got me throught three months of eircoms DSL will be out next week shiat)



Gateway/ Firewall/ Virus
I use Smoothwall as gateway, dhcp server & cacheing proxy, it does everything I need it to for a 27+ computer network.
regularly updated Antivirus and anti spyware software is essential, people will open anything if they dont own the computer, and if it crashes/ causes a porn pop up avalanche will just leg it without tellling you most of the time
I use SpybotS&D and Spywareblaster and adaware too.


Hardware
This is largely at your discretion, For web-browsing and general day to day internet usage the newest PCs are total overkill both financially and performance wise,
Allocate a few high spec machines for gaming ang get a bunch of ex-lease pIIIs for general use.
I have a central scanner/printer, it saves a lot of grief if you do the scanning rather than having to help dimwits every 5 minutes as they scan their interminable baby pictures and try to send 4meg uncompressed pictures to hotnail addresses.......
As for CD-recording you're on shaky legal ground there, I still only have one, people ca d/L into a shared folder and i burn the files for them,after making sure i wont get in trouble for it.
USB devices, generally people ask before plugging things in. If they don't , throw them out.

Network design/ topology
I did all the network wiring myself, so it saved me a few quid, get a box of cat5, a crimper and RJ45 sockes and plugs, and tear into it, its piss easy.
A lot of quality refurbised networking gear is coming on the market now as companies upgrade to Gb LAN.
10/100 switched network, again I have the smoothwall box running a dhcp server so all the machines are automatically configured for net access etc.

Operating Systems/ Applications
You really have to stick with M$ based OS's your day to day luser wont even try to use an alternative,
I use as many GPL apps as possible though, openoffice, realalternative, mozilla and opera are on all the machines too, but few people use them.
I'm running 98 on all the client machines atm. .. Not sure what i'll do next year when support is discontinued.
then your basic set of apps, winamp, media player, er... chat clientsand all the other stupid crap people want to use

Charging and Control
Google will give you lots of options here
I use Antamedia Caffe software, its cheap and does the job, you can have member acounts, pre and post-pay facilities time based discounts www.antamedia.com


Righto i'm off on break, i'll finish this later

anthonymcg

Originally posted by damnyanks
Wi-Fi is very insecure. Saw an article some place about some guy going around London with a home made attena getting onto large coporation networks.

Depends on your encryption. I was gonna be working with a broadband company who offered wireless broadband. They also switch the frequency every couple of nanoseconds within a reasonable range which also reduces the likelihood of it being picked up.

Capt'n Midnight

The simpliest way is to use a VPN so they have to log in to use the system.

have a look at nocatauth etc. - captures port 80 so can't bypass it.


WiFi security requires everyone to be using the same WEP key
(802.11x or somesuch is not suitable for a cafe when you have to be able to connect them easily)

eg: WiFi / DHCP - if user can then connect to the login screen THEN give them the login/PW .

eh - re switching frequencies - sounds good but all RF data technologies use this all you need is a similar piece of gear.

All you are trying to do is stop people connecting in unannounced. - As far as snooping is concerned any one at any pc could download and run a sniffer program.

daveg

Firstly I would have as much IT experience as a lot of other boards members but I did help setup/run a cafe for about 3 years. So from my experience....

Originally posted by dod
Bandwidth/ Connection
EsatBT business DSL line. Costs €90pm for 512K which is excellent (and is uncapped).

Gateway/ Firewall/ Virus
We ran with no firewall (:rolleyes: not my decision) for about 3 years. You will be hacked with DSL. I wasn't involved in this setup but the cafe now has a linux server with software firewall provided by EsatBT. Beware though this software is expensive as you will need a qualified/experienced engineer to set it up and it will have to be bought from EsatBT. However I'm sure there are other options. As for antivirus we used Norton. Easy to setup and not that expensive. You have 1 years free updates but if you use ghost imaging (as I have desribed below) it will not expire

Network design/ topology
What networking software do you recommend?

No idea. Not my strong point.

Hardware

For web surfing only you need only low end PC's. However I would recommend top of the range machines (p4, 512MB, GEf 4's) for gaming.

Scanners/headphones (not speakers)/printing is all good but I would not recommend a writer. We got burned big time. a previous employee put a sign on the window saying CD's copied for €2.50. We got in serious shít.


Operating Systems/ Applications
Windows XP or 2000 ONLY. DO NOT USE WINDOWS ME. ME hates a networked enviroment.

Charging and Control
Research your own area. Check out other cafe pricing and what is offered.

The Café part
If you could setup with some kind of machine coffee/snacks/gormet cakes your onto a winner. The markup is collosal.

Physical security
Never had any issues. So long as an employee is in the cafe all the time. Again depends on location.
[/B]

My only other advice would be buy Norton Ghost. Image ALL machines onto a hidden partition (using TweakUI)(including server - removable drive). put back the image every few days. You will not believe how clogged the systems will get from customers installing shíte. You could also lockdown your machines. You can buy software to do this as well.

Hope that helps

daveg

*Hope that helps

* unless your setting up in Galway as my best mate runs the cafe I setup now. If you are I hope the place burns down. Only joking.

Rew

Originally posted by Capt'n Midnight


eh - re switching frequencies - sounds good but all RF data technologies use this all you need is a similar piece of gear.

All you are trying to do is stop people connecting in unannounced. - As far as snooping is concerned any one at any pc could download and run a sniffer program.

Thank god for a voice of reason....

Dont bother with notton ghost have a look at G4U

U can have a boot disk/CD-ROM for the PC's which would image them or re-image them at any time...

There is off the shelf net cafe software which is execlent and sorts alot of problems with running net cafe's

Dont give access to cd-writers or offer a cd-writer services you leave your self wide open to copyright infringment.

Get a DSL line for bandwith, get a DSL router or use a linux box to screen off you net.

U can get a domain name and have your web site and mail hosted off the linux box as well if u get a static IP.

Id get a couple of cameras and video recorders, better safe then sorry and if somebody does something dodgy online u have a video of them.

Virus scanner on every PC and on your server. Kaspersky have a server client setup available

Listen to all of Capt'n Midnight's suggestions he's on the ball with all of em.

echomadman

Right, back to it


where was I..

The Café part
Having a full cafe will bring you into the watchful eye of the health-board, unless the premesis you go for already has HACCP approval, dont bother unless you have €€€ to spare, as was mentioned already though, the mark up on this stuff is pretty high, bear in mind you'll need to allow for extra staff if you do this too.
I subscribe to the coke and snacks ethos here, but we do have the best coffee in town.

Physical security
Not too much of a consideration for me, but in less savoury locations it could be a problem, You can mount the computer cases in lockable frames, and use cheap mice/keyboard combos to make theft less appealing.




AOB
Er, i'm in #tech.ie and #boards.ie most of the time, if you want any more info give me a shout

as for the WiFi... have a WAP to hand, and turn it on if someone wants to use it, leave it off otherwise.

Re: blocking websites, If you go with a linux firewall like smoothwall or ipcop, its a very simple to modify squids configuration to block certain sites, or you can get one of the net-nanny programs that are out there, I personally dont agree with this, I rarely restrict access to sites, If i see someone obviously taking the piss, i walk over and tap them on the shoulder.

[edit]
if its in ennis, I'll be round in the dead of night with a sledgehammer [/edit]

The Beer Baron

ok- for the record those you don't know I work with echomadman so what I'm reffering to is the setup he already explained.

Regarding the content and minors and that potential pandoras box- you can't really, tweaking IE to use M$'s content manager is a waste of time as well as using any of that net nanny crap you might find on corporate networks- it's not viable in an internet cafe. Our smoothwall/squid GUI allows us to look at what each machine is viewing in real time, every URL typed comes up and all we need do is click is, if we see something we don't like- well, hehehe- that's where the BOFH meme comes into play.

something like my favourite descrete:

SORRY SIR BUT YOU REALLY CANNOT BE LOOKING AT GAY PORNOGRAPHY IN A PUBLIC INTERNET CAFE- PEOPLE CAN SEE IN THE WINDOW!"

You can use this tactic also when it's a sad git looking at straight porn and embarras him in front of every girl within' earshot (bearing in mind I'm an incredibly loud ****er)

Anyways...

You can do site and/or ad-blocking. Word to the wise- adblocking can do more harm that good. 1st time we used ad zapping it zapped practically the entire net, yahoo, e-bay, piece of **** pigsback.com (j00 cheap bastards!) every american webmail portal in existence...

Still it's good for keeping the gator corporation off your backs.

Antivirus is important. You wouldn't believe the stupididty of some people- really you wouldn't. Just because you're a smart-arse don't mean other plebes won't reply to Nathan Shabooboo of the International Bank of Lagos. Or go- ohh! An email from Bill@Microsoft.com! Duuuh?! what's this? click!


Avoid big bloatware ****, use something cheap and cheerful. (we use freeware and it keeps us cheerful) You want something that does the job without hogging too many system resources- you're gonna need them- believe me!

VNC is a must.
Or something like it.
If need be you'll need to be able to assume control of any machine in the building. Saves you gettin' up off your arse too.
More time for boards- hurrah!

Security in general is gonna be a compromise- forget everything you know about a secure network. It all goes out the window when Valter Nywnkywowski the Polish chatmonkey is downloading Vlaah.exe over GaduGadu, Akmed MacMed is chatting to his buddies in Lybia whilst downloading a batch of zipped "pdf's" from www.jihad.net (I ain't bull****iting)

Chatmonkey's are a pain, yahoo in particular seems to crash every second. This is a personal vendetta of mine against the Yahoo chat program- never underestimate the security doomsday that is H0tSexyBabefromIrelandI'MnotAb0red22StoneHousewifeHonest@yahoo.com.
These sexually-starved behemoths are the reason the "I love you" virus spread like wildfire. Like it's RL equivilant- deviant l00sers will gladly practice unsafe cybersex and bugbear your whole network if you're not careful.

Good AV- and regularly updated. Win updates too, if applicable.
As echo sed- we use M$ 'cos that's what the plebes want.
I mean we're considering migrating to Linux when they stop supporting 98 but it's dubious. We use Open Office and Abi Word here- too perfectly functional word processors which are compatible with and, to my mind, identical, if not superior to M$Word. But they still bitch about us not having Word- like it's the only WP package in existence and I fell like smacking them, then poking their eyes out with a paperclip. (to signify that paperclip)

The same goes for browsers- the big blue E signifies internet to every culture on earth it seems. Except for the occasional yank who thinks their l33t by opening mozilla only to totally destroy the effect by logging onto AOL.

Another thing to mention is Norton Ghost- or something like it.
Keep a ghost of each client machine and service them regularly.

/me wonders if I should erase that last one and practice what I preach?

Yeah I should do that straight aw -Ohh! An irc quiz!!!

dod

That's pure gold guys, thanks so much for taking the time out to write up all that detailed material. I'll let you know when we get to the next stage.

it's not in Ennis, but next time I'm down there I'll drop in

Gerry

Some good advice here, the first thing that was missed out on is that you need to do a lot more research than just a post here. You need to go around to every netcafe you can find, if you haven't already, with a notebook, and jot down what's good, what's bad.
I think for a start, that the monitor, mouse and keyboard should be very high quality. Unless you are targetting gamers, thats all you really need to worry about. The mice should be optical, theres plenty of reasonably priced ones to choose from. The keyboard should not be a 5 euro piece of ****, which I've seen so many times, for example non standard key layout, half sized enter key, etc.
Your pricing should be undercutting others, and have special offers for the midnight to 8am crowd.
I'd recommend going with linux. Yeah, it will take you longer to setup, but at least you won't get infected by viruses or worms or adware, or get your machines compromised on a daily basis. You can lock down the machine, and customize it completely to your cafe. You won't have a massive microsoft bill either. If you are worried about users asking for MS Office, you can purchase software from codeweavers, which lets you install and run microsoft office on linux.

http://www.codeweavers.com/products/office/

Its pretty cheap, and works perfectly.
Many popular games work under linux, you could run some windows machines for games I suppose. But definitely give a lot of thought to running most of your machines on linux.

maxheadroom

Originally posted by Gerry
I'd recommend going with linux. Yeah, it will take you longer to setup, but at least you won't get infected by viruses or worms or adware, or get your machines compromised on a daily basis. You can lock down the machine, and customize it completely to your cafe. You won't have a massive microsoft bill either.

but, if you're buying machines from the Dell's of this world, you won't save any money by going linux. If you're getting refurbs, you'll need to check out what licences come with them.

If you're going the build your own route, then linux may be a viable option though, but you'll need to do lots of research into what distribution to use and how to configure / lock it down.

If you regularly ghost the machines, you won't need to worry about the machines getting compromised.

echomadman

But definitely give a lot of thought to running most of your machines on linux.

I did/do but you underestimate the sheer terror of people whan faced with even the mildly unfamiliar.

Also dod, as most of your customers will probably be foreign, you need good language support, japanese/chinese/korean input, arabic text support.... the list goes on.
unless you're a guru, linux will give you a lot of headaches in a day to day average luser environment,

That said, once you're up and running you're in an ideal position to triall it on a few machines

/me patiently awaits the *nix zealots to brand me a heretic

The Beer Baron

Or mentioning the pandoras box of windows emulation- no wait they don't call it *emulation* in Linux, what they call it...?

And as for mice and keyboards? We use cheap crappy ones.
Why?

In our experience it wouldn't be prudent to buy expensive ones because well, A, anything not nailed down is likely to be lifted, and B, I'll be honest- these people are our livestock, and like many sorts of livestock they have no qualms in wallowing in their own filth. Hence we get greasy paws, food, dirt, ashes, coke, coffee and other coagulative compounds of organic nature that I'd rather not mention.

And and let's not forget the day echo split his hand open on a crappy case and bled for 3 hours.

Winters

I would advise getting a MS OS, but get something you can control. Get windows 2000 or XP Pro or something where, as an administrator you can limit the customers ability on the computer. Dont let them access certain programs, install files and the like.

If you look at net cafe's where you have full access to the computers, their cmputers are totally screwed up the ... well you get the point. I has in dNC one day and i noticed a lot of crap installed on the PC i was running on. This chineese tool bar installed. Spyware toolbars installed and the like. And dont mention the weird settings some people had but on them.

Gerry

Originally posted by maxheadroom
but, if you're buying machines from the Dell's of this world, you won't save any money by going linux. If you're getting refurbs, you'll need to check out what licences come with them.

If you're going the build your own route, then linux may be a viable option though, but you'll need to do lots of research into what distribution to use and how to configure / lock it down.

If you regularly ghost the machines, you won't need to worry about the machines getting compromised.

You are entitled to a refund of the oem license fee if dell insist on charging it. The time spent configuring it and locking it down saves time in the future when the machines don't get knocked out by viruses and spyware.

Gerry

Originally posted by The Beer Baron
Or mentioning the pandoras box of windows emulation- no wait they don't call it *emulation* in Linux, what they call it...?

And as for mice and keyboards? We use cheap crappy ones.
Why?

In our experience it wouldn't be prudent to buy expensive ones because well, A, anything not nailed down is likely to be lifted, and B, I'll be honest- these people are our livestock, and like many sorts of livestock they have no qualms in wallowing in their own filth. Hence we get greasy paws, food, dirt, ashes, coke, coffee and other coagulative compounds of organic nature that I'd rather not mention.

And and let's not forget the day echo split his hand open on a crappy case and bled for 3 hours.

Well, if you want to push your cafe at gamers its not a good idea to have crappy mice. Doesn't matter how great your connection is, if the mouse is useless you won't hit ****. Not everyone is bothered bringing their own mouse around with them all the time. You can cut down on theft by putting each pc in a secure metal compartment.

Gerry

Originally posted by echomadman
I did/do but you underestimate the sheer terror of people whan faced with even the mildly unfamiliar.

Also dod, as most of your customers will probably be foreign, you need good language support, japanese/chinese/korean input, arabic text support.... the list goes on.
unless you're a guru, linux will give you a lot of headaches in a day to day average luser environment,

That said, once you're up and running you're in an ideal position to triall it on a few machines

/me patiently awaits the *nix zealots to brand me a heretic

For the past 3 months, the rest of the people who live in my apartment have been forced to use linux, because thats whats on my laptop. Most of them got over their terror, and realised that kde isn't a million miles away from windows.

Linux has excellent language support... I don't think theres any problem there.

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/HOWTO-INDEX/other-lang.html

maxheadroom

Originally posted by Gerry
You are entitled to a refund of the oem license fee if dell insist on charging it.

Yes, but you'll only get about €20 back, if memory serves, which won't even buy a licence for crossover office. You'd probably need crossover plugin aswell.

Although, your best bet in this case might be to buy one of the distros that come with crossover included, maybe one of the suse desktop suites?

The time spent configuring it and locking it down saves time in the future when the machines don't get knocked out by viruses and spyware.

If you restore to a clean image every night, how will you have to worry about machines getting knocked out by viruses or spyware? This does assume identical hardware in each machine though.

STaN

Holy moly...

has a guy just asked you to put together a business idea for him?!

I wanna setup a car dealership... how many sales guys do i need?

Gerry

Originally posted by maxheadroom
Yes, but you'll only get about €20 back, if memory serves, which won't even buy a licence for crossover office. You'd probably need crossover plugin aswell.

Although, your best bet in this case might be to buy one of the distros that come with crossover included, maybe one of the suse desktop suites?


If you restore to a clean image every night, how will you have to worry about machines getting knocked out by viruses or spyware? This does assume identical hardware in each machine though.

Fair enough on the refund.
Regarding the images, well a machine could get knocked out an hour after you image it. Its gonna be in a crappy state for the rest of the day.

BigEejit

I use images for machines at work, no cdroms on the machines so I use ghost over the network (dos mode, it was a bastard to get the network drivers going right) ... stick in a floppy and reboot, after 8 minutes I go back and take out the floppy and reboot and change a few settings ... about 5 minutes work on my part and the machine is out of action for approx 15 minutes .... your mileage may vary, that was with an image of about 600MB....

edit
Of course if you made an image for each machine and had them on the server, there would be no need to change settings after each imaging .... cuts down your work to about 30 seconds

fisty

Identical spec win2k machines,
multicast ghost them every night from a decent locked down image with secure desktop or similar preloaded.

Can be done in about 5 for a bunch of machines.

That will stop moronic users fecking yer machines.

fisty

and remember, except for linux...

you get what you pay for, so if you invest in ****e that's exactly what you'll get...

The Beer Baron

I'll concede on the mice and keyboards for the games.
Then again, we had a LAN night here for some boards folk and they didn't seem to complain.

The gaming side of out cafe is in its infancy @ the moment. We really don't want to invest too much capital into it at this early stage of our business. Still, it's good for the boys to come in and play UT, our resident RPG addict, our resident Day of Defeat addict and dah Raawshins who come in every night and vaahnt tuu play Counterstrike!

If you look at net cafe's where you have full access to the computers, their cmputers are totally screwed up the ... well you get the point. I has in dNC one day and i noticed a lot of crap installed on the PC i was running on. This chineese tool bar installed. Spyware toolbars installed and the like. And dont mention the weird settings some people had but on them.

Yeah. It depends on the service you want to provide.
Do you want to allow you lusers to do as they please (to a point) or do you want them to sit there with only 3 icons on the desktop they can't click. We were, initially going to lock down every machine TIGHT but rethought our strategy.

The library here provides free, but limited internet access.
It's a mickey mouse eircom(grr!)-sponsored affair, you can maybe read your email(so long's there's no cuss words in it) basically it's a nanny-fied service- but hey it's free.

Now here we offer a machine and a set-price time on the internet. All we want is they come in, pay, sit down and leave when it's finished or- as is usually the case- beg for more.

In all fairness we have a WWI general's approach to our PC's- march 'em till they drop. We picked them up cheap and they'll have a cheap funeral too, perhaps we might scavenge them so that other may live. They crash- 'cos they're windoze, they get spyware, adware, tool bars, a yank will come in, search google and get nothing but Russian sites, in Russian. People piss about with the start bar, we have one guy who resets the startbar Mac style, we have another people who log off on the start bar rather than log off the machine and also forget to log out of their email accounts and instant messengers- it's chaotic but, well, the trick it to stay vigilant.

Our worst enemy therefore is this site, and others- that...oooh a photoshop competition!

Kappar

How much would it cost to setup an Internet Café in Dublin? Would it be worth your whill seen as there 10 to the dozen these days?

Winters

Originally posted by Kappar
How much would it cost to setup an Internet Café in Dublin? Would it be worth your whill seen as there 10 to the dozen these days?

The main cost in Dublin would really be property prices. For the city centre it would cost a lot of money to buy or rent a property. And ... lets not forget about insurance now :rolleyes:

jim_bob

forget about ghost and the like if there is going to be games on the machine's your image could go up to about 20gigs or more depending on what you put on them what i suggest you use is on of these babes http://www.lodestar.co.uk/ practicly no matter how big the image is it will be restored with in seconds all you need is a spare pci slot and your away

The Beer Baron

How much would it cost to setup an Internet Café in Dublin?

Dublin?
Lots of competition there. (Good for the consumer, potentially
bad for you)
I assume the setup costs would be hell.
Plus insurance.

Add the fact that we had to get the electrics done and do the network from scratch.

Reassuring aren't I?

Kappar

I can just imagine how much the setup costs would be. Then the amount of cafes allready would make it even harder I don't think i'd bother now.

The Beer Baron

depends on where you're setting it up tho.
City Centre or whatever- hell.
But there's a lot of different areas in Dublin where the costs
would be relativly low and business would be quite high.

Where exactly were you hoping to set it up?

BenH

Originally posted by The Beer Baron
Or mentioning the pandoras box of windows emulation- no wait they don't call it *emulation* in Linux, what they call it...?

As I spent frikkin hours explaining to you, emulation occurs at the CPU level - Hello Mr x86 pretend your an 8_bit ARM so I can play Elite.

Linux, well WINE, uses a fake windows file structure that allows windows programs to be installed, then uses modified DLL's to let them run.

Also try setting up one of the Xp style windowmanagers, or set up some of the machines in KDE's kiosk mode and kiss goodbye to headaches.


BTW, Hello everyone else, I'm Damien and Ed's mildly psychotic Linux guru

Regards,

BenH

Gerry

Erm, dunno how you mean it occurs at the cpu level. Theres many different levels that it could occur at, and you just tarred two of them with the same brush.

Emulating a machine with a different cpu architecture ( like mame emulating a 68000 on an x86 or sparc ) involves translating instructions.

Wine works at a higher level, translating windows api calls into linux api calls.

Another example is FreeBSD's linux binary emulation, which just renames linux syscalls into their freebsd equivalent.

BenH

Originally posted by Gerry
Erm, dunno how you mean it occurs at the cpu level. Theres many different levels that it could occur at, and you just tarred two of them with the same brush.

Emulating a machine with a different cpu architecture ( like mame emulating a 68000 on an x86 or sparc ) involves translating instructions.

Well my original explanation to Damien was alot more detailed. The way I was taught, and the way the Wine crew prefer to terminology, this is emulation.

Wine works at a higher level, translating windows api calls into linux api calls.

Another example is FreeBSD's linux binary emulation, which just renames linux syscalls into their freebsd equivalent.

This however is a compatability layer as it occurs at a much higher level, entirely independant of the machines hardware.

Regards,

BenH

The Beer Baron

Also try setting up one of the Xp style windowmanagers, or set up some of the machines in KDE's kiosk mode and kiss goodbye to headaches.

Would be interesting to see if we could sneak in a Linux box masquarading as windoze to see if anyone notices.

If not we can sneak in another one.

It'll also help me develop my l33t p3|\|gu1n skillz.
Rather than have me giggling hysterically playing Tux racer-
"go widdul penguin! GOOO!"

Gerry

Originally posted by BenH
Well my original explanation to Damien was alot more detailed. The way I was taught, and the way the Wine crew prefer to terminology, this is emulation.




This however is a compatability layer as it occurs at a much higher level, entirely independant of the machines hardware.

Regards,

BenH

Yup, wine is emulation, but it isn't hardware emulation. Its translating the windows api calls to linux api calls, and doesn't depend on the hardware either, apart from the fact that windows only runs on x86 pc's right now. You are correct about FreeBSD's binary compatibilty not being proper emulation.

BenH

Originally posted by The Beer Baron
Would be interesting to see if we could sneak in a Linux box masquarading as windoze to see if anyone notices.

If not we can sneak in another one.

YES!! go on try it! The lusers will wine at first, but whats new there.

It'll also help me develop my l33t p3|\|gu1n skillz.
Rather than have me giggling hysterically playing Tux racer-
"go widdul penguin! GOOO!"

As I've asked you many times before bud _dont_ use script kiddie speak while I'm around. And how about creating a few levels for tux racer yourself?

BenH

Originally posted by Gerry
Yup, wine is emulation, but it isn't hardware emulation. Its translating the windows api calls to linux api calls, and doesn't depend on the hardware either, apart from the fact that windows only runs on x86 pc's right now. You are correct about FreeBSD's binary compatibilty not being proper emulation.

Well to be fair, there is a varient of windows nt that will run on an Alpha. We have an old, currently unused dual 400Mhz alpha currently being crippled with it. I'm trying to buy it cheap to denbianise it. That and the Alpha design is a frikkin work of ART!!

Gerry

Thats why I said "right now". You are referring to nt 3.51. Afaik, they developed nt4 for alpha, but didn't release it. Dual 400mhz alpha would be nice ok, if you can get it cheap

BenH

Originally posted by Gerry
Thats why I said "right now".

Oops sorry, missed that

You are referring to nt 3.51. Afaik, they developed nt4 for alpha, but didn't release it. Dual 400mhz alpha would be nice ok, if you can get it cheap

I would also have to factor in the savings it'll give me on heating bills in the winter. Of course these would be wiped out by the cooling bills in the summer

maxheadroom

Originally posted by Gerry
Afaik, they developed nt4 for alpha, but didn't release it.

Hmmm - Back in '98 I was on work experience in DEC and they definitely had internal builds of NT4 for Alpha, I remember installing it...

Gerry

Ok, I'm being misinterpreted all over the place here, so I'm going to be pedantic. Release, without a qualifier like "beta" or "internal" normally means a public release. NT4 for the alpha wasn't publicly released.