radiusd - Yet Another Radius Daemon (YARD RADIUS)

radiusd [ -AbchoPsvxz ] [ -a acct_dir ] [ -d db_dir ] [ -f alt_passwd_file ] [ -i ip_addr ] [ -l log_file ] [ -p udp_port ] [ -q max_outstanding_reqs ] [ -t max_queue_secs ] [ -w max_proxy_secs ]

YARD radiusd is a program that provides authorization and accounting services for remote hosts, based on RADIUS protocols. RADIUS protocols are defined in a pair of RFC documents and currently used by the majority of network access servers and routers in order to manage incoming dialup connections. Open source products of RADIUS clients are also available for general use on *nix hosts.

YARD RADIUS daemon is largerly based on the original Livingston Inc. RADIUS 2.1 daemon (currently known as Lucent Inc. Remote Access RADIUS server 2.1 - Livingston Inc. is now disappeared...). It enhances the original code with a number of useful features, such as control of simultaneous logins, support of many non standard vendor clients, autoconfiguration capabilities, PAM services, MD5 passwords, etc. All them are very useful in real world area of application (e.g. ISPs). A complete and up-to-date list of extensions currently present in YARD RADIUS is available in the Changelog file, which should be enclosed in sources.

The daemon listens to a couple of non privileged UDP ports (1645 and 1646) and possibly to other two ones (1815 and 1816), when proxy is enabled. Those ports could also be changed at run-time, but you are not encouraged to do this. If your authorization information are available either as a separate passwd file or self-contained in users file (i.e. in some form independent from system passwd file, see below) you could run radiusd as a non privileged users.

All configuration files of YARD RADIUS are contained under /usr/confdirectory if not spe

-a acct_dir

Sets the accounting directory instead of the builtin default. The default is choosen at configuration time and it is generally /usr/logs

-A

Enable accounting via PAM. See below.

-b

Uses GDBM for the users file ( users.db ) instead of the plain text version ( users ) This improve performances of users file checking for authentication. It's strongly suggested. But it's not completely equivalent to plain text, because GDBM files are strictly unsorted. This could be ok or not, it depens on your specific choices of attributes. You need to run builddbm to convert the plain users file in the GDBM indexed file and this needs to be done every time you changes users file contents.

-c

Clears user stats database. This should be done to solve troubles due to unsynchonized status among the servers and one or more of its clients. Mabye, after a cold-reboot of an access server.

-d db_dir

Sets the database directory instead of the builtin default one. The default is choosen at configuration time and it is generally /usr/logs.

-h

Prints out usage of the command.

-f alt_passwd_file

Sets an alternate password file name to use instead of the system password file /etc/passwd.

-i ip_addr

Sets an alternate IP for the server host, instead of the default one. This is useful if the host on which the daemon is runnig has multiple interfaces or ip aliases.

-l log_file

Sets a logging text file, to use instead of syslog.

-o

Accept all-zero accounting requests authenticator. A damned thing to use with some old non-RFC compliant clients. Use this if you see this kind of errors in the logging file, only.

-p udp_port

Set an alternate radius port number. Default ports should be (optionally) defined in /etc/services as follows:

l l. Name Port _ radius 1645/udp radacct 1646/udp radius-proxy 1815/udp radacct-proxy 1816/udp

If they are not in that file, the above ones are used. If you specify the port `n' as the argument of -p option, then radiusd tries to use the following ports:

l l. Name Port _ radius n/udp radacct n+1/udp radius-proxy n+5/udp radacct-proxy n+6/udp

-P

Enable authorization via PAM. See below.

-q max_outstanding_reqs

Sets the incoming packets queue size. 100 is the default.

-s

Forks another process for accounting. This is not generally suggested, due to dependencies among auth and acct modules in YARD radiusd .

-t max_queue_secs

Set time out for requests queue.

-v

Print version. It shows also enabled features. Version number should be a group of three point-separated numbers, such as major.minor.patch where meaning of the three values should be obvious. It's not easy to define a `major' advancement in respect of a `minor' one. Anyway, any minor/major number should correspond to a different branch in the CVS repository. This is not true for a patching release.

-w max_proxy_secs

Set time out for proxy requests.

-x

Set debug mode on. It increases verbosity level.

-z

The same of -b -x -d . -a ra. This is intended for debugging.

radiusd requires a group of configuration files under /usr/conf in order to properly work. Examples of those working files are provided with sources and should be present under the same directory, with extension .example. All files are well commented and it should be easy to customize them. The work files are the following ones:

/usr/conf/users

This file contains the human readable information for users' accounting and authorization. See radius_attributes(5) for details about its syntax.

/usr/conf/users.db

The same of the previous one as compiled in by builddbm in GDBM format. It needs to be compiled again every time you make changes to the previous one and without restarting radiusd .

/usr/conf/dictionary

This read-only file contains the codes and formats for standard and vendor RADIUS protocol attributes and values along with their human readable representation. It is subject to change, due to new access server supports. It is a plain text file with a pletora of comments in it.

/usr/conf/clients

It contains names or ip addresses of remote clients authorized to use the server for authentication and accounting, along with their passwords in clear text. So this file should be protected with mode 600.

/usr/conf/clcache

The same of the previous file as cached in GDBM format for fast access at daemon startup. With the same recommendations for file access modes.

/usr/conf/proxy

This file is used to collect proxy hosts and their associated realms and passwords. It contains a list of remote servers to forward to authentication and accounting requests.

Every line refers to a different proxy server: the first field is a valid hostname or ip address; the second field (seperated by blanks or tabs) is the shared secret); the third field is the named or numeric authentication realm; the fourth field can contain the optional RADIUS UDP Port number of the remote server, the RADIUS and RADIUS Accounting Port numbers, and any of following optional keywords:

l lw42. old T{ Strip realm and do not attach Proxy-State when forwarding T} secure T{ Allow remote server to authorize admin logins for your client T} ipass T{ Use the ipass protocol T}

The realm string must follow an `@' sign after the username to identify the correct proxy server.

/usr/conf/allowuser

You can list here (one per line) usernames/groupnames who are granted for having access (if their password are correct). Each entry must respect one of the following syntaxes:

l l. USER: <username> GROUP: <groupname> GECOS: <string> SHELL: <string>

so you can match users by usernames, groupnames, gcos substrings (i.e. case-sensitive sub-strings in the fifth field of the system /etc/passwd file or the alternate password file), or shell paths. You can use the special string `ANY' as a matching argument too (e.g. `USER: ANY'). An empty or missing file grants access to anyone which is not listed in the next file.

/usr/conf/denyuser

The same syntax of allowuser can be used to deny access to specific classes of users, with the same previous matching criteria. An empty or missing file grants access to anyone which is listed in the previous file or not.

Note that all users have always to match their password with the authorization module selected in their `users' file entry, after the above files allowed to login. You cannot use these files to grant access without any other additional authentication.

/usr/conf/stopuser

This text file is created by radwatch to deny access to users, when certain conditions are reached (as selected in the radwatch configuration file). The authentication daemon radiusd consults that file along with `denyuser' in order to grant access or not. It has an entry per line, which should be a valid system or `users' username.

/usr/conf/radwatch.conf

This is the configuration file for radwatch. It is a text files each line of which is of the form: user_list:restriction:time_list where `user_list' is a comma-separated list of usernames for which this line apply. You can use @group syntax to denote the standard UNIX user groups. The field `restriction' is the value in seconds of the maximum permitted online time within the `time_list'. This one is the third colon separated field and is a list of days of the week and times during which this restriction apply to this user. The valid days are 'Su', 'Mo', 'Tu', 'We', 'Th', 'Fr', and 'Sa'. In addition, the value 'Al' represents all 7 days, and 'Wk' represents the 5 weekdays. Times are given as HHMM-HHMM. The ending time may be before the starting time. Days are presumed to wrap at 0000.

/usr/conf/config.aeg

This text file contains the configuration information necessary for radiusd to connect to the ActivEngine, which is the ActivCard Authentication Server. See comments contained in the example file provided for details.

All logging and accounting files of YARD RADIUS are stored under `/usr/logs'. Accounting files are organized on a per-month and per-year basis. All files written by Livingston's server are also written by YARD, but it also creates some specific binary files to store the on-line status of users, and collect users statistics.

It's important to ensure that those files are synchronized with the real status of the clients, to avoid annoying denial-of-service troubles to your users (e.g. in conjunction with a Yard-Simultaneuous-Use attribute). This could happen when one or more clients reboots without sending suitable stop accouting records before. In those cases, YARD has to be killed too and restarted with a `clean up' argument `-c', in order to reset its internal status.

The logging file structure is as follows:

l l. <year>/user-stats GDBM yearly file <year>/radlast-XX Binary compact monthly file <nas>/<year>/detail-XX Livingston-like logging text file

This allows very fast computing of statistics and maintaining on-line status.

Bugs? What's a bug?

builddbm(8), radlast(1), radlist(1), radtest(1), radwatch(1), radius_attributes(5), gdbm(3)

Francesco Paolo Lovergine <francesco@yardradius.org>.

A complete list of contributors is contained in CREDITS file. You should get that file among other ones within your distribution and possibly installed under /usr/docs directory

Copyright (C) 1992-1999 Lucent Inc. All rights reserved.

Copyright (C) 1999-2001 Francesco Paolo Lovergine. All rights reserved.

See the LICENSE file enclosed within this software for conditions of use and distribution. This is a pure ISO BSD Open Source License .

The configuration of a RADIUS server is an argument too long to deal with it here. Please, refer to the official Livingston documentation, which includes the RADIUS for UNIX Administrator's Guide. It is freely available at http://www.livingston.com/tech/docs/manuals.html at the time of this document.

It's a very good point to start with.