FreeRADIUS 1.1.0 review

FreeRADIUS is the premiere open source RADIUS server

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 2296K Developer: The FreeRADIUS Server Project

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FreeRADIUS is the premiere open source RADIUS server. While detailed statistics are not available, we believe that FreeRADIUS is well within the top 5 RADIUS servers world-wide, in terms of the number of people who use it daily for authentication.

FreeRADIUS project scales from embedded systems with small amounts of memory, to systems with millions of users. It is fast, flexible, configurable, and supports more authentication protocols than many commercial servers.

The FreeRADIUS Server Project encompasses more than just a RADIUS server. The related software includes a PAM authentication module, and an Apache 1.3 and 2.0 authentication module. The server comes with a PHP-based web user administration tool, called dialupadmin.

The RADIUS server has more features and is more flexible than any other free software RADIUS server, and many commercial servers. Most commercial servers are distributed as a "base" system ($), and an "enhanced" version ($$) with more features. FreeRADIUS has all the features of a commercial "enhanced" server, without the associated cost.

In it simplest form, the server is similar to Livingston's 2.0 server. Many configuration files are similar, and the general operation of the server should be familiar to anyone who has used a variant of the Livingston server.

FreeRADIUS can be extended significantly from this simple form, however. There are many modules and configuration files which have no equivalent in older RADIUS servers. These new features permit FreeRADIUS to work within complex systems, and environments which require high performance.

To support the demanding requirements of a modern RADIUS server, FreeRADIUS features more than 50 vendor-specific dictionary files. It ships with support for LDAP, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle databases. It supports EAP, with EAP-MD5, EAP-SIM, EAP-TLS, EAP-TTLS, EAP-PEAP, and Cisco LEAP sub-types.

It supports proxying, with fail-over and load balancing. It has reached a stable 1.0 release, with incremental improvements being added and tested daily. In short, it is a powerful, fast, and complex RADIUS server which is compatible with the latest network protocols and practices, and is well suited for deployment in any size network.

What's New in This Release:
This release is focused on new features and bugfixes without sacrificing stability.
New features include more vendor dictionaries, support for Lucent and Starent VSAs, support for Juniper encrypted VSAs, N-tier certificates, and load-balanced access to back-end databases.
In addition, the Perl module is now stable, and a new "sql log" module may be used to lower the load on an SQL server.
The new features are complemented by a number of bugfixes.