Am Mittwoch, 9. Oktober 2013, 09:41:19 schrieb Alex Sharaz:

> Hi,

>

> Is anyone out there load balancing RADIUS with an F5 load balancer? We're

> doing it here, but I can't help thinking that the actual load balancing

> algorithm need some tweaking.

>

> As far as I'm aware ( systems section support the F5 boxes)

>

> 1). We're using round robin to spread the load over 2 back end radius

> servers. 2). There is some "general" sticky persistence so that once a RAS

> device starts talking to a particular back end server it continues to talk

> to that server for a predetermined length of time ( might be an hour, not

> sure). This ensures that an eap dialogue will always talk to the same back

> end server for the duration of the "stuck" time. Not sure what happens when

> you get to the end of the time interval though.

>

> According to the F5 statistics, overall radius traffic seems to be shared

> evenly over the 2 back end servers. However, our most heavily loaded RAS

> client is our wireless network. While we have 900 switches doing mac and

> 802.1x based auth, we can have 6000+ users on our wireless network all

> authenticating to RADIUS via 3 RAS clients. Looking at the back end server

> log files, it does look as if, in general, all wireless RADIUS auths head

> for the same back end server.

>

> I was wondering if there's a way off having a bit more granularity in terms

> of how the f5 load balances incoming RADIUS requests.

You would need to use application layer load balancing on the BigIPs. But I don't think that you can configure this on the BigIPs. The RADIUS protocol is stateless, so there is no criteria in the application that a load balancer could use to balance inside the application.

Greetings,

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Mit freundlichen Grüßen,

Michael Schwartzkopff

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