Making Your own ISP Server, with GUI ! Intro

This system will help you build your first ISP ( internet service provider) box, or server. first we chose an older platform where we could get our GUI to work with no isses. We later found out we should have choosen the newest version, but for testing purposes, our system works great.

hardware.

old rackmount 1 u Compac Dual 800 mhz CPU
512 megs ram
2 - scsi3 with built in raid.
for an old box, its fast.

Software:

Fedora Core4
Webmin
Freeradius
Cistron Radius Webmin Module
Usermin Module

patience and time. Project takes abotu 8 hours from start to finish if you have a balasing connection. if not the donwload takes longer. I used fedora since its easy of use and GUI ( plug in monitor and keyboard/mouse) and system operates like desktop as well. I dont recommend it, at all. nothing like someone deleting your data .......

We searched the net and checked out chat systems seemed pretty stable. The live CD that is still number one is Slax, but we needed to be more familiar and fedora is easy to build servers with!

First we dowloaded fedora core. We ftped, and found a place in japan that had it all. We first dowloaded the CD's, and then grabbed a free copy of ImageBurn. Burned 1-4 cd's. Booted machine and fed it disk one. I told it to install in text mode. Its fastest and puts less crunch on the pc.

The disk after disk, you add each one. I chose all on the list, so I would have all the development things I needed. I found out that you do not need but apache, ftpd, sendmail, popper, imad, and freeradius.

I went to the sight and downloaded the source. They do have an RPM but it was for a much newer ( told ya I made a mistake) version. We downloaded the source and folled the instructions.

next came the GUI. Was not hard to choose. We grabbed Webmin a free server admin GUI. It installed fine from source. RPM didnt work for us, but we think lots of the packages were out of date.

next we did a system upgrade. Yum -y upgrade . ours was 956 mesg and took less than an hour to pull ( on 15 megabit connect). rebooted after installs completed.

next went package by package and saw what was installed and what was not. Some needed configuration fixes, and some I had to goto webmin and goto third party. searched for cistron ( what freeradius comes from ) and grabbed the module. Edited the configuration after I got radius up and running. Now I can add and remove network clients on PPPOE (DSL) and Dialup.

Once everything was up to snuf, we started trying to upgrade things like CPAN, perl, and then lock down the server. It runs web pages, allows FTP server access, does mail for domains ( downloaded and configured virtualdomain by webmin ) and added bind (DNS) and a few configuration fixes there as well.

I will be documenting over the next month the complete process to allow our coop memembers access to building thier own community networks.