right tutorial

[Alan DeKok]

On Jun 26, 2018, at 10:31 AM, Kaya Saman <kayasaman at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I admit when I first started with FR I did have some issues figuring things out and understandably your responses Alan were quite short and sharp.

  Yes...

> The documentation does cover how to get a "working" setup. Is it to the point? In respect to does it suite everyone's use case; *no*! Different installations/requirements need different things, be it backend or what have you; this requires some knowledge and understanding of what you have and what you're trying to achieve and knowing the different components to put together.

  That's one of the hardest concepts to get across.  FreeRADIUS can do almost anything.  Which means it's impossible for us to document exactly how to do everything.

  Instead, we rely on documenting the pieces.  The list is then about helping people put the pieces together.  That then creates a solution.

> Following the list + docs most if not all of my questions have already been answered so now without needing to ask basic questions I have a nice working setup.

  The docs are much better than they were for v2.  Many, many, questions are now answered by "go read doc X".  Which should help a lot.

> Generally reading many posts, mostly from newbies they always seem to have a similar theme and questions or issues. The best thing to do is *read* then work methodically through the examples, VM's are a nice simple way to do this, then when running FR view the information output and actually read and try to understand what it says.

  That's what we try to explain.  Sometimes it takes time to convince people that there really is no "magic solution".

  Another problem is that RADIUS is *much* more complex than DHCP or DNS.  DNS is "here's a name, get me an IP".  DHCP is "here's a MAC, get me an IP".  Not complex.

  In contrast, RADIUS is VPN, dial-up, ADLS, Wifi, etc. with PAP, CHAP, MS-CHAP, 10 different EAP types.  And then SQL, LDAP, Redis, proxying, ...

  And the combinations. :(

> So yes FR is awsome and the community is great and what I especially like is Alan's responses are always a nice kick in the butt to make people think for themselves and try to stand on their own two feed rather then being "baby sitted". Though I think we need to find a nice 'bot' or automation system for trivial questions like "it doesn't work help?" ..... Response: "Hello this is the FRad bot, Step 1. RTFM, Step 2. Read, Step 3. Think" :-P

  Yup.

> Anyway my views and humor aside, thanks to everyone for all the help directly and indirectly :-) :-)

  Despite my occasional crankiness, helping people is what I do.  And, it's my goal.

  The good news is that we're working on making v4 better.  I don't talk about money or business a lot, but perhaps it's useful.

  I'm not only 100% on FreeRADIUS, there are others, too.  And I'm investing money into making the documentation and examples better. i.e. paying a full-time salary for this work.  On the expectation that the end product will be better and easier to use.

  When I started FreeRADIUS as a hobby ~20 years ago, I didn't think I would end up paying people to work full-time on it.  But that's where we are now.

  Alan DeKok.