On Sat, Jun 14, 2008 at 10:12:20AM -0400, Richard Siddall wrote:

Pete Kay wrote:

...

I am working on deploying 2 load balancing freeradius in a HA environment. Could someone suggest the best way to do it? I am comfortable with using ldirector as the load balancer, but I am not sure how to do the "check-alive" for freeradius within ldirector.

Any suggestion will be greatly appreciated.

Pete,

My recollection is that when this has been discussed in the past the consensus was that there's no advantage to running FreeRADIUS in an HA environment since RADIUS already supports redundant servers.

I would have to dispute that. We've seen NASes across the range (Cisco, 3Com, Extreme) fail to move to the backup/secondary radius server they've got configured. Sad, but true.

A.L.M.Buxey@lboro.ac.uk wrote:

Hi,

...

I would have to dispute that. We've seen NASes across the range (Cisco, 3Com, Extreme) fail to move to the backup/secondary radius server they've got configured.

report such bugs to the manufacturers of the NAS devices and double check your device configs - several of them have quirky ways of failing over. if you do want to point to a single IP etc then just standard L4 balancing will work Yes, though if you're using EAP make sure that requests from a NAS aren't spread over multiple servers. - but ensure that the FR boxes are sharing the same information if you rely on accounting records for decisions (eg simultaneous usage)

If you're look for a generic solution, layer 7 load balancers are the answer; We are considering them because NAS based fail-over schemes are never perfect, you always have to have a few missing responses before the NAS realises something is up and does something about it. -- Arran Cudbard-Bell (A.Cudbard-Bell@sussex.ac.uk), Authentication, Authorisation and Accounting Officer, Infrastructure Services (IT Services), E1-1-08, Engineering 1, University Of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9QT DDI+FAX: +44 1273 873900 | INT: 3900