Building an ISP

I’ve had this idea in the back of my head for ages, it’s centred round buying a building (something like an old Yorkshire mill, or better yet a private island) and dividing it up into a number of homes/offices/co-working paces.

To go with this fantasy I’ve been working out how to build a small scale boutique ISP (most of this would probably work for a small town community fibre or wireless mesh system) to share the hugely expensive high bandwidth symmetric dedicated fibre .

Over the next few posts I’m going to walk through building the PoC for this (which is likely to be where it stays unless I win the lottery)

To work out what I’d need lets first look roughly how home internet connections works.

At the advent of Home Internet there were two methods of delivering IP packets over a telephone/serial line, SLIP and PPP protocol. PPP became the dominant player and was extended to encapsulate PPP packets carried over both ATM (PPPoA) and Ethernet (PPPoE) frames in order to facilitate the move to DSL Home Broadband connections. PPPoE became the standard for the next evolution, FTTX (Where X can be B for building, P for premisses, or H for Home ). Modern home routers include a modem that converts DSL signal back to Ethernet frames and a PPPoE client to unpack the PPP connection back into IP packets to forward on to the network.

This means we need a PPPoE server for the users router to connect to, Linux has PPPoE support both as a client and as a server. I’ve already used the PPPoE client when the router for my FTTC Broadband service was late arriving.

Now we have the basic connection between the users equipment and the ISPs network we need to be able to authenticate each user so we know who is actually trying to connect. You can hard code credentials and details into the PPPoE configuration files, but this doesn’t scale and means you need to restart everything when ever something changes.

The better solution is something called a RADIUS server. RADIUS is a AAA service that can be used to not only authenticate users, but also supply information to the PPPoE server about that user, e.g. a static IP address allocation. RADIUS can also be used for accounting to record how much bandwidth each user has consumed.

RADIUS servers can be backed by a number of different databases but the usual approach is to use LDAP.

In the next post I’ll cover installing the LDAP and RADIUS servers, then configuring them.