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:
- It's free (under the GNU GPL license)
- Supports access based on huntgroups
- The users file is processed in order, multiple DEFAULT entries
are possible, and all entries can optionally "fall through"
- Caches all config files in-memory, including the "users" file
- But it can also keep the users file in a DBM database file
- Keeps a list of logged in users (radutmp file aka session database)
- Logs both UNIX "wtmp" file format and RADIUS detail logfiles
- Supports Simultaneous-Use = X parameter. Yes, this means that
you can now prevent double logins!
- Supports Vendor-Specific attributes, including USRs non-standard ones.
- Supports proxying
- Supports the "Alive" packet
- Can replicate accounting data between servers
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