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.

From that How-To, ISP Ltd. was born as people contacted me for help in building an ISP network. By 2005 the market for selling turnkey packages appeared to have all but gone away (at least for my company). ISP Ltd. did reached its pinnacle of manpower in 2002 and its acme of production in 2004. Today I am providing consulting services only, mostly writing database application programmes as I have done since the 1970s except now the applications are all web-based.

During the years I assembled documentation on the best methods I found to do various things with Linux servers. Some things are still in head and yet to be written, and there are plenty of great tips that I haven't though of and will run across almost daily. So I thought it'd be a good idea to take what I've gathered and share it, and let other people contribute, and see if this might become a nice compilation of knowledge for small ISP entrepreneurs.

This is still very much a work-in-progress. Many notes and memories have are yet to be compiled here. If you have something to share, please contribute your discussion, 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 reserve the right to edit any content or delete any account that I consider to be spamming, abusive, or otherwise inappropriate.

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, Italian, French, Spanish, and Hrvatski.

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, Unix, and BSD. 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