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Date:      Fri, 20 Jul 2001 13:01:16 +0300
From:      Panagiotis Skoulikaritis <pskoul@egreta.gr>
To:        FreeBSD Questions <questions@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: need help configuring radius
Message-ID:  <3B58016C.1BDFCA38@egreta.gr>
References:  <003d01c110f9$46a368e0$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com>

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Hello Ted

I would like to thank you, you were very informative.

Thanks
Panagiotis

Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:

> First, you don't want to ask this here, instead you want to subscribe to
> the portmaster-radius mailing list at http://www.livingston.com/tech/archive/
>
> Secondly, what your asking is not simple.  For example there's a couple
> of Reply attributes out there that might work - Port-Limit and MultLink Flag,
> but these are not standard.  You must check your NAS documentation to see
> if it recognizes them and applies them to ISDN multilink calls.  Further
> they only work if you only have a single NAS.
>
> The usual method of doing what your wanting to do is to use a RADIUS server
> such as cistron that has support for setting multiple login limits.  The
> way these servers work is if you only permit a single session for a user
> they will authenticate the first session then deny all other auth attempts
> as long as that session is logged in.  Therein is the difficulty, however,
> because RADIUS is a stateless protocol and as such there's no direct
> connection
> between the radius server and the NAS that the radius server can use to
> synchronize a database of who is logged in and who isn't.
>
> What some people do to track logins is to depend on the start and stop
> records, they increment a counter when they get a start record and
> decrement it when they get a stop record.  This works OK for small NAS
> with just a few ports, there's a radius daemon at
>
> http://yardradius.on.openave.net/
>
> that works quite well for that.
>
> However, for anything significant (more than 20 ports or so) you run into
> synchronization problems.  Some NAS have piss-poor accounting record control,
> Portmasters have been known under heavy load to not bother sending start
> accounting records or sending duplicates.  Also RADIUS is UDP so you could
> lose the packet anyway.  Then you get into a situation where the radius
> server thinks a user is logged on when they really arent thus the next time
> they call in the NAS won't let them logon.
>
> More sophisticated servers like cistron get around this problem by issuing
> an SNMP query to the NAS every time they see what they think is a simultaneous
> login attempt, to check and see if the first login is really there.  This
> requires some fooling around with scripts and ucd-snmp.  Also it's very
> NAS dependent - if you have a collection of NAS from different manufacturer
> then your going to really be hosed and some NAS (USR for example) don't
> give out that data via SNMP so you have to do other scripting with Telnet
> scripts.
>
> At our site we started out with the free radius 2.01 daemon Livingston handed
> out
> then finally dumped it for YARD because of the simultaneous use thing.  But
> I only lasted about 8 months with dealing with that because of the problems of
> keeping the radius daemon in sync with a big nas with many T1's coming into
> it.
> I finally scrapped all that and went to ICradius
> (ftp://ftp.innercite.com/pub/icradius) which is a modified cistron
> that runs on a mysql server.  It also has several web-based interfaces to
> it which helped greatly because we have admins that I don't trust with UNIX
> command line access.  Also having all the accounting in a SQL server is
> extremely
> useful, beforehand we used to have to futz with all these icky perl scripts
> to attempt to get reporting off the monthly detail files which were huge.  Now
> we can query usage on the fly which helps with troubleshooting as well as the
> customers that call up claiming they never used the service and why are we
> billing them.  There's also some other tiered billing things that become
> possible with SQL queries that I won't get into.  But I will warn you,
> although it's a great radius server it's very complicated and not simple to
> setup on FreeBSD.  It's easy to see why the commercial radius servers like
> Steel Belted Radius are selling so well.
>
> Ted Mittelstaedt                                       tedm@toybox.placo.com
> Author of:                           The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide
> Book website:                          http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com
>
> >-----Original Message-----
> >From: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
> >[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG]On Behalf Of Panagiotis
> >Skoulikaritis
> >Sent: Friday, July 20, 2001 12:14 AM
> >To: FreeBSD Questions
> >Subject: need help configuring radius
> >
> >
> >Hello
> >
> >I need help with configuring my radius server.
> >I would like to distinguish on how my users log in depending on their
> >contract with either 64 kbps isdn or 128 kbps isdn.  So far I' m using
> >the attribute NAS-Port-Type = ISDN, but this way every user that has
> >this attribute can use both channels of the isdn even though they
> >haven't subscribe for that.  Any help would be appreciated.
> >
> >Thanks
> >
> >Panagiotis
> >
> >
> >To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
> >with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
> >


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