Installing and Testing the FreeRADIUS Server

RADIUS (Remote Authentication Dial In User Service) is a client/server protocol based on UDP.

The example presented in this section describes a RADIUS server that is a daemon process running on a Linux server.

The following example shows how to install and test a FreeRADIUS server:

tar -zxvf freeradius-1.0.2.tar.gz        (extract with gunzip and tar)
./configure
make
make install                             (run this command as root)
radiusd                                  (start RADIUS server, or...)
radiusd -X                               (start RADIUS server in debug mode)
radtest test test localhost 0 testing123 (test RADIUS server)

If radtest receives a response, the FreeRADIUS server is up and running.

Note

Note

RADIUS server software can be obtained from several sources. This solution uses the FreeRADIUS software available on the following URLs: www.freeradius.org and www.redhat.com. Another free tool, NTRadPing, can be used to test authentication and authorization requests from Windows clients. NTRadPing displays detailed responses such as attribute values sent back from the RADIUS server.