Welcome to the ISP How-To. I hope you find information that benefits you here.

This information was first compiled in 1998 after unsuccessful attempts to find details like this on the Internet. I wanted to start an ISP and I decided the best move was to do it with Linux, but all the web sites I found were vague, causing me to spend many months figuring out how to get basic things working, and several years to get everything working well.

During the years I assembled documentation on the best methods I found to do various things with Linux servers. Many things are yet to be written down, and there are plenty of great ideas I regularly come across while surfing the web. So I thought it'd be a good idea to take what I've gathered and share it, and let other people contribute. Perhaps this will become a nice compilation of knowledge for small ISP entrepreneurs.

Please contribute your discussion comments, tips, make a section for a topic you think is missing, etc.

All content falls under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licence, as you will see stated on the bottom of the edit screens. Any use of the works here must reference this site.

If you want to contribute, please create an account. I will do my best to keep spam and other inappropriate content from the site.

Avoid vulgar, foul, or abusive language. If you wouldn't say it to your five-year-old niece in front of her father who is the local church pastor, then don't write it here.

As far as spoken languages go, I would like to limit this site to English, Italiano, Francais, Español, and Hrvatski. If you create or translate a page in something other than english, please put it in a subdirectory with a two-character language code. For example, in the server_guides section you translate a page called 'email' into Italian, so the new page should be named server_guides:it:email). Pages can be renamed if you ever forget to do this.

I'd like to keep this wiki 99% MS-free. If a comparison needs to be made to illustrate a point, that's fine, but let's stick to Linux. Personally, my primary focus is Gentoo Linux, though I don't mind if people want to create pages or sections for unique aspects of other distributions.

I guess that's all for now. I hope this site proves useful.

— Angelo Babudro 2009/06/19 11:01