FreeRADIUS + 802.1X wireless rollout questions

[Walter Gould <gouldwp@auburn.edu>]

List,

Our institution (a 4 yr. state college) is planning on implementing a 
802.1X wireless network in the coming months.  We have a test network in 
place now and all seems to be working well.  We have two FreeRADIUS 
servers.  We followed the "FreeRADIUS Active Directory Integration HOWTO 
<http://wiki.freeradius.org/FreeRADIUS_Active_Directory_Integration_HOWTO>" 
from the wiki to get freeradius talking with our centrally managed AD 
servers for authentication.  We are using freeradius version 2.0.3.  The 
primary server specs are: Intel 2GHz Xeon QC, 2GB installed RAM.   The 
secondary is currently running on a vm.  I hope to purchase a piece of 
hardware similar to the one above to run this on in the near future.

Here's where my concerns lie -  I am concerned about how many 
simultaneous authentication requests that a single Freeradius server can 
handle.  I have read the "Testimonials" and the "Why we're #1" pages on 
the freeradius site - which says there are numerous sites using 
freeradius to support more than 10,000 or 20,000 users.  Our school 
currently has around 21,000 students on our campus.  Of that 21,000 - 
there is usually around 1000 users logged into our wireless network at 
any given time, however, that number continually increases.

Questions:
1. Do any of you have feedback/thoughts/experience on how our freeradius 
server may handle the auth. request load given our situation?

2. Do you think that we may need to tweak any of the settings in the 
radiusd.conf file  (max_requests, max_request_time, etc)? 

3.  Any other advice/suggestions you have or think of would be welcome 
and appreciated.

Thanks,
Walter

--
Walter Gould
Info. Tech. Specialist
Office of Information Technology
Auburn University, AL