[plug] Learning/setting up RADIUS

[Anthony J. Breeds-Taurima]

On Tue, 20 Aug 2002 ryan at is.as.geeky.as wrote:

> I got radiusd-cistron, had a bit of a read and got it authenticating between
> two machines as I had expected using plain text as well as system password
> (databases will come later).
> 
> I'm as yet unsure why there are so many different implementations of RADIUS
> server, but they all seem to use the same config files and respond the same
> on a test basis.  I'll get the Cisco dude to give it a try and we'll see how
> it goes.

It came about because livingston (the company the "invented" radius) only ever
supplyed a "sample" implementation.  It was very basic. It wasn't OSS,
from there people in thre OSS community built servers, then people extened the
feature set (db, pam etc etc).  Then the protocol was exteneded with RFC's, 
then vendors "extended" (these extensions are VSA's [Vendor Specific 
Atrittibutes]) it and on the whole it became very messy.

Then new people built servers with lots of feature sets and all the VSA
support you could want, and started selling it :(  So the OSS community got on
board and built more servers.

I think you can see now why there are soo many.  Of the one I wrote, extended
and used freeradius does what I need, and has some pretty cool features.

> Cistron seemed to have much better commented files to learn from than the
> others - lucky I stumbled across it as I was staring at blank config files
> with some of the other ones :)

freeradius is based on cistron, I find the config files and man pages very
usefull, and as I said it does come with a complete set of RFC's covering the 
current radius protocol.


Yours Tony

   Jan 22-25 2003           Linux.Conf.AU            http://linux.conf.au/
		  The Australian Linux Technical Conference!