North American Network Operators Group
Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

Re: Radius Opinions

  • From: Greg A. Woods
  • Date: Fri Jul 21 18:39:25 2000 
[ On Friday, July 21, 2000 at 15:22:13 (-0500), Bradly Walters wrote: ]
> Subject: Radius Opinions
> 
> Looking for a stable and scalable radius solution.
> (Should handle at least 5,000 users.)
> 
> What's the current favorite?

I'm still using the Cistron RADIUSd-1.5.4.3 with over 4400 users in
/etc/passwd now; on a PII-300MHz/196MB running NetBSD/i386 that's also
the mail server and homepage web server, and it's not even breathing
hard.  There are three Livingston PM-3's querying it with a peak of
about 110 lines active daily.  I don't know what the peak number of
logins per second is, but there were over 2200 yesterday all together.

I've been thinking of upgrading to 1.6.1 for some time (1.6.3 is now
available I see), but there just haven't been any problems with it at
all.

I've tested the 1.5.4.3 release, though not under any significant load,
on the same kind of system with a faked-up password file of 50,000
users, and it worked just fine.  I've no reason to believe that on
appropriatelye powerful dedicated hardware that it couldn't handle the
full 4.2 billion users possible on your average modern unix-style system
and a similar increase in transactions.  You might have to put your
radwtmp file on a memory filesystem and do something to handle the load
of writing billions of accounting and log file records ever day, but
other than that it's a pretty basic little server that just chugs along.

You can find it in ftp://ftp.cistron.nl/pub/people/miquels/radius/ or
on ftp://ftp.freeradius.org/pub/radius/

There's an alpha snapshot of the "freeradius" derrivative, but it's
almost 3.5 times as big and I've never even looked at it.  On their web
page they say "The FreeRADIUS server is currently in alpha development,
and is NOT ready for production use."

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <[email protected]>      <robohack!woods>
Planix, Inc. <[email protected]>; Secrets of the Weird <[email protected]>