Who here has had experience with FreeRADIUS?

[InlineFive]

I'm contemplating setting up a FreeRADIUS server for the heck of it and am wondering how hard it is. If you need good knowledge of Linux (of which I have none). Any other thoughts on it that come to mind...

THank you!

-Por

 

[ScottMac]

I use it as my primary RADIUS box at home (IAS on WIN2003 Server as a backup / secondary).

I couldn't find binaries so I downloaded the source and compiled it for the machine (Sun Ultra60) using GCC.

The config files are well documented. I suggest reading through the config files, figure out what services you need to provide, and then set it up. freeRADIUS can do pretty much everything from basic MD5 hash to LDAP and certificate authentication.

If you are not familiar with the details of RADIUS, the O'Reilly book is excellent and I recommend it.

Good Luck

Scott

 

[InlineFive]

OK, wait a minute here. Does the O'Reilly book tell you how to get FreeRADIUS working? Does it have good guidelines to follow to get it working?

And (since I am new to Linux) how hard is compiling FreeRADIUS for say, Mandrake 10?

 

[ScottMac]

The O'Reilly book is specific to RADIUS ... but not any particular version or producer. It covers the different catagories and type of use, and detailed descriptions of each configuration parameter and AV pair (AV = Attribute / Value).


It's not too hard to compile. In general steps, from my aged, flakey memory they are:

* Download the tar.Z file
* run gunzip <filename> to uncompress the file into the target directory
* run tar (tar - xvf <filename> to unbundle it into the traget directory. tar will create subdirectories as necessary.
* run CONFIGURE (a utility that will tailor the source to match the capabilities of your environment)
* run make (make is a utility that runs a script to compile the source modules)
* run make install (the "install" keyword will copy the executables and config files to the operational directory / directories)
(optional: run make again to remove the gen files)

* then you configure the ".config" files and edit the startup files to light up RADIUS after a re-boot

All of the above is documented in detail in the README and .doc files.
The radiusd.conf and clients.conf files are pretty well documented.

If you are not familiar with RADIUS, it might be good to start easy: turn on md5 and play with that, then start turning on the more advanced auth / auth features.

Good Luck

Scott

 

[InlineFive]

Thanks for the advice. Once I get SDRAM later this afternoon I'll get this baby working.