Cistron RADIUS server, version 1.6.8


Introduction

Cistron RADIUS is an authentication and accounting server for terminal servers that speak the RADIUS protocol. The author is Miquel van Smoorenburg .

Short overview:

Some documentation:

Read the FAQ

There is a Cistron Radius FAQ online. Check it out!

Tutorials

Where to get it

Stable version

The file name is radiusd-cistron-1.6.8.tar.gz and you can find it on our FTP server

The 1.6.x series are maintenance releases, sometimes a new feature creeps in but they are all considered stable. You should always run the latest in the 1.6.x serie.

Patches

If there are patches that are needed to run the latest released official version, they are listed below: Patches should be applied by placing the patch in your homedirectory, changing directory to the source of the radius server, and using patch -p0 < ~/name-of-file.patch

Nightly builds are available at ftp.freeradius.org/pub/radius/CVS-snapshots/

Make sure you get the radiusd-cistron-* files, and NOT the freeradius-* files. Cistron Radius is not FreeRadius!

Cistron Radius does use the CVS server from the FreeRadius project. You can access the CVS archive anonymously to get up-to-date snapshots, see the FreeRadius website for details on CVS access.

About FreeRadius

As you might have noticed, there have often been long delays between the beta releases of 1.5.4.3. Ofcourse not everybody was happy with that. Alan DeKok decided to take matters in his own hands. In the beginning of 1999, he started a Cistron Radius descendant under the name "FreeRadius", and registered the freeradius.org domain.

I realized he was right. For a bright future of the server, it needed to become a group effort. So around August 1999 I spent some time merging my development code with Alan's. The resulting new codebase is now called FreeRadius. Development is done by a group of core-developers who have access to the CVS archive at cvs.freeradius.org. If you're interested have a look at the FreeRadius website .

But, again, note that FreeRadius is NOT Cistron Radius. Cistron Radius is still maintained because a lot of people use it, but it will not get any major new functionality such as SQL support, LDAP support etc.

Unofficial patches

Quite a number people have sent me patches. Some of these I'll integrate, some I won't because I don't like them or I want to do it differently, but there's a collection of them on the unofficial cistron-radius patches page. You'll also find pointers to ICRadius by Mike Machado and XtRadius.

Precompiled

There aren't much precompiled versions of radius available at the moment. 1.6.8 is the latest stable version. The Debian stable distribution (codenamed sarge) still comes with 1.6.6.

RedHat has a 'powertools' CD that also has Cistron Radius included. RedHat Linux 6.2 Powertools comes with 1.6.1, 7.0 with 1.6.3, and 7.1 with 1.6.4. RedHat has dropped support for Powertools in RedHat Linux 7.2. However there is an update to 1.6.6 available at the redhat site because of the security issues in earlier versions (DOS attacks, if you wondered).

Mauricio Andrade has RPM packages for Cistron Radius available at ftp://ftp.mma.com.br/pub/cistron-radius-RPMS

Marek Cervenka has RPM packages for 1.6.6 + SQL patch at http://kotel.iqnet.cz/radiusd-cistron/ .

Mailing list

There is a mailing list for Cistron Radius. You can get all the information about the rules for this list and on how to subscribe and unsubscribe at http://www.radius.cistron.nl/list/

FreeRadius development Mailing list

There is a mailing list for developers of freeradius. More information about that list can be found here .


Last update 08-Feb-2006

miquels@cistron.nl