[AusNOG] Radiator vs FreeRADIUS

[Ben Lisle]

I'll paste my answer from the last time this was asked on this list.

---

I really can't give a high enough recommendation for Radiator.
Fantastic product.  Amazing support if you need it by Hugh and Mike.
I think there's a free 30 day trial version you can download.  Grab
that and have a look at the goodies/ directory which should give you a
good idea on what you can do.

Management wise regardless of whatever you pick you're going to have
to build some glue yourself (it does come with a gui for use
management but I've never used it).  You can't get around that.
Radiator being a written completely in Perl is very extensible.
Performance wise we've never had an issue with it.

If you wanted to go the free route I'd recommend FreeRADIUS.

If you have any questions feel free to shoot me an e-mail.

---

Radiator is amazingly extensible with little to no cost in performance.  I
had to handle some edge cases for devices that were no longer made (mainly
STB's) and that was handled fine with calling pre/post-auth hooks that I
wrote.  The speed which I could iterate was probably the biggest selling
point for me.

Performance wise the main thing you need to look for is your backend.
 99.99% of Radiator performance issues are usually with services external
to Radiator (back-end SQL, LDAP, some restful service) being slow, but even
then you could work around with if you wanted to make your customers lives
a little easer.  I wrote some tests for our installation in Tsung and we
were getting 2.5k req/sec of a single box with the SQL backend being the
limitation.  I never tested the server itself without any of those backend
systems.

Support wise, and it was something we never used, Hugh and Mike (and now
Harry?) are always on their mailing lists.  If you have a look at the
archives you can see some of the questions and answers.  Always nice to
know the people who build the product are there openly helping others.

1K is not a lot to pay for something that'll be critical in your operation.
 You'd probably spend more on coffee over 12 months.

That all being said I had a FreeRADIUS instance configured in our lab that
did about 95% of the work our production Radiator did.  With some further
time operationally they would have been the same.

If you've got any specific questions shoot me an e-mail off-list and I'll
see if I can answer them for you.



On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 11:24 AM, Luke Iggleden <luke+ausnog at sisgroup.com.au
> wrote:

> Hi Peter,
>
> My first line was my disclaimer, the last time we used an open source
> radius was cistron radius, which from the existing website now recommends
> freeRadius. If we were successful with Radiator, why would we spend time to
> go and review another RADIUS?
>
> I know nothing about the current version of FreeRadius and I never
> suggested that I did. I was merely giving a +1 for Open's Radiator as we
> have used it for 8+ years supporting 10's of thousands of users.
>
> In particular we had a requirement to do lots of re-writing of radius
> packets using handlers & hooks which no other product had the ability to do
> those years ago which can easily be done right out of the radiator config.
>
>
>
>
> On 19/05/2014 11:10 am, Peter Tonoli wrote:
>
>> Hi Luke,
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>>
>>> From: "Luke Iggleden" <luke+ausnog at sisgroup.com.au>
>>> To: ausnog at lists.ausnog.net
>>> Sent: Monday, 19 May, 2014 9:37:39 AM
>>> Subject: Re: [AusNOG] Radiator vs FreeRADIUS
>>> Hi Radek,
>>>
>>> Been a long time since we have looked at FreeRADIUS.
>>>
>>> Radiator is rock solid, scales well, and is extremely flexible. Over
>>> many years of running an ISP that was the glue that held everything
>>> together for us.
>>>
>>
>> Not trying to start a war here. We've found FreeRADIUS to be rock solid,
>> and extremely flexible. I'm just wondering what Radiator can do that
>> FreeRADIUS can't (apart from the web GUI), and vice-versa?
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Peter.
>>
>>
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