Radius w/ MySQL?
nightrav asks: "I'm one of the systems administrators at a small ISP (about 20k customers) and we're currently looking on moving to a different Radius solution. Currently we are using Merit with LDAP which is proving to be extremely slow and causes a great deal of authentication issues if a Total Control chassis reboots or experiences some other problem that causes it to dump its users. We would like to use some sort of Radius/MySQL solution for authentication and accounting and were wondering what solutions the Slashdot community would recommend."
I can wholeheartedly recommend Radiator. It's written in Perl, which makes it really easy to extend to your own needs, etc. It's got built in modules to both log to and authenticate from Radius. It just works... and works quite well. It's not free, however, which a lot of people don't like; it's worth every penny you'll pay for it though. link.
http://www.freeradius.org
Wanna Pay? Steelbelted RADIUS
http://www.funksoftware.com
http://www.cisco.com/pcgi-bin/Support/PSP/psp_view .pl?p=Software:Cisco_Secure_ACS_UNIX
or
http://www.gnu.org/software/radius/radius.html
or
http://www.freeradius.org/
FreeRadius seems to be able to deal with datasource changes better than the GNU Radius Server. You can set up user auth info in OpenLDAP for FreeRadius and set up OpenLDAP in a Master-Slave cluster for scalability and robustness.
Postgres can also be used to store both auth and accounting info from FreeRadius and has the ability to live in a cluster for reliability purposes, I know their also working on scalability clusters, but I don't know how far along it is.
Having your user auth info in OpenLDAP will prolly get that info out faster than Postgres, but it can only be used to store auth info. It will most likely be easier to store all the data in Postgres.
Don't use MySQL if you want scalability, speed and robustness all in one package. Postgres has got much better features when it comes to this, it also has native data-types for ip addresses and such.
OpenLDAP might make your migration easier, with any new data you want to store going to Postgres.
I'd recommend thouroughly testing these setups first. Especially the clustering.
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
I'm the network administrator for an ISP based in California with 10k customers, currently. We use radius + e-mail services authenticated against MySQL, and I can very easily help you configure it...
First off, we use ICRadius for our RADIUS server... Using MySQL replication, we avoid a single point of failure... ICRadius is free, and based on Cistron Radius... It works for our needs. Secondly, we use the Exim MTA for SMTP, and Courier IMAP for pop3/imap services... Mail is stored on a RAID exported over NFS, so mail servers are quite easily clustered... Lastly, we have a home-grown account management program we wrote, called "Nebula" that manages all aspects of an account...
If you'd like examples of a config file, implementation suggestions, of even a copy of Nebula (it's open source, free), please let me know. You can e-mail me personally at work at dbauman (at) infostations (dot) net. I even have the origional ICRadius + MySQL howtos from years ago when we migrated away from Cistron, and also the ISP-Planet's ISP-Radius mailing list can be of help to you...
-PhaseBurn Welcome to Linux country. On quiet nights, you can hear windows reboot.