Hi Shawn,

Monday, June 26, 2006, 10:16:40 AM, you wrote:

> On Monday 26 June 2006 14:12, Patrick Murphy wrote:
>> One (remote?) possibility would be to look into becoming our own ISP,
>> or a "virtual" ISP, but I know little about it.

> i just googled for "Hutterite".. never heard of it before this..

I'm not suprised - our "religious cousins," the Amish, are much more
well known. We differ from them in that we allow modern technology,
and have a more communal lifestyle and we are few in number in
comparison to the Amish.

> yes, you could set up your own community gateway and set up your own filtering
> rules on the gateway.. however, this would require some knowledge in
> networking and firewall configuration..

Are you saying we could have Internet access through an ISP and the
ISP would route all traffic through our gateway? If so, are there
ISP's willing to work with us to do that? Another question for the
list is whether we should do it ourselves, or hire someone to help us.

> it's relatively inexpensive as you can just use any old computer as a
> gateway.. install a special firewall linux distribution like 
> http://www.smoothwall.org/.. configure it to block everything except approved
> sites..

> then, you'd just need to make sure that all community traffic flows through
> this gateway..

Is this easy to accomplish? I'm googling [Internet "community
gateway"] and have a lot of hits; the term appears to be used in
several contexts.

> cheers..

> with metta,
> shawn tan.

Thanks for your help!

-- 
Best regards,
Patrick Murphy
James Valley Colony
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