Bandwidth & Hardware Requirement Question
Hi all, I have done basic setup of freeradius and tested in my old PC (PIII). Now I want to do the real thing but I need some estimation regarding this. Can somebody share their knowledge on this? What is the bandwidth requirement for dedicated radius service based on numbers of user or hotspots. Yes I know more the better and more users mean more bandwidth but is there a rough formula for this? X users = Y bandwidth (roughly) Besides what kind of hardware (can I use desktop computers for this purpose), minimum memory? Can I use the radius and mysql in same server or run separate in same LAN? (recommendation) Also I need a rough estimate on how many users can be handled by one server with certain hardware+memory ideally. Some expert advice is greatly appreciated Thanks -- ============================== Registered Linux User #460714 Currently Using Fedora 10, CentOS 5.3 ==============================
Bandwidth is needed on your router. Between your router and your radius server you will only have authentication and accounting packets which are small and do not consume much of a bandwidth. Radius server will not do any rate limiting, radius server will only send rate limit data to router, during authentication, if you tell him to. You can use desktop computer (P4 for example) for radius server. You can have sql server on separate lan/computer. or not, it's up to you. You can authenticate thousands of users on one pentium 4, with basic setup. Deepak wrote:
Hi all,
I have done basic setup of freeradius and tested in my old PC (PIII). Now I want to do the real thing but I need some estimation regarding this. Can somebody share their knowledge on this?
What is the bandwidth requirement for dedicated radius service based on numbers of user or hotspots. Yes I know more the better and more users mean more bandwidth but is there a rough formula for this?
X users = Y bandwidth (roughly)
Besides what kind of hardware (can I use desktop computers for this purpose), minimum memory? Can I use the radius and mysql in same server or run separate in same LAN? (recommendation)
Also I need a rough estimate on how many users can be handled by one server with certain hardware+memory ideally.
Some expert advice is greatly appreciated
Thanks
On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 2:27 PM, Igor Smitran<sigor@blic.net> wrote:
Bandwidth is needed on your router. Between your router and your radius server you will only have authentication and accounting packets which are small and do not consume much of a bandwidth. Radius server will not do any rate limiting, radius server will only send rate limit data to router, during authentication, if you tell him to. You can use desktop computer (P4 for example) for radius server. You can have sql server on separate lan/computer. or not, it's up to you. You can authenticate thousands of users on one pentium 4, with basic setup.
Thanks for info I needed. I got the hardware part. Regarding the bandwidth in router, how much bandwidth is needed (rough estimate) given that thousands of users are online and radius is continuously getting accounting packets from various APs? Supposing if I have 2.0 Mbps line dedicated just for this, how many user's accounting packets I can handle normally? Rough estimate will do. I just want to have general idea before committing. Thanks again -- ============================== Registered Linux User #460714 Currently Using Fedora 10, CentOS 5.3 ==============================
Depends a lot on NASs implementation of accounting. Some NAS send accounting packets every X minutes. Some do it based on accounting timers per session... so bandwidth utilization is quite different.
From a live server having 2000 users online, with NASs sending accounting updates every 5 minutes (from start of session), the bandwidth utilization for accounting alone is less than 20kbps (@ average accounting packet size is 120 bytes).... so in this case 2Mbit can do 200,000 sessions... you will have bigger issues than bandwidth once you hit those numbers!
For authentication take the percentage of total subscriber base that is generally online at any given time, and percentage of users logging in at peak hours. The average authentication packet size is less than 200 bytes... do the math and you will get how much b/w required for authentications. Padam Deepak wrote:
On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 2:27 PM, Igor Smitran<sigor@blic.net> wrote:
Bandwidth is needed on your router. Between your router and your radius server you will only have authentication and accounting packets which are small and do not consume much of a bandwidth. Radius server will not do any rate limiting, radius server will only send rate limit data to router, during authentication, if you tell him to. You can use desktop computer (P4 for example) for radius server. You can have sql server on separate lan/computer. or not, it's up to you. You can authenticate thousands of users on one pentium 4, with basic setup.
Thanks for info I needed. I got the hardware part. Regarding the bandwidth in router, how much bandwidth is needed (rough estimate) given that thousands of users are online and radius is continuously getting accounting packets from various APs?
Supposing if I have 2.0 Mbps line dedicated just for this, how many user's accounting packets I can handle normally? Rough estimate will do. I just want to have general idea before committing.
Thanks again
Deepak wrote:
Thanks for info I needed. I got the hardware part. Regarding the bandwidth in router, how much bandwidth is needed (rough estimate) given that thousands of users are online and radius is continuously getting accounting packets from various APs?
It's up to YOU. You can set the accounting update interval for one user. You can see how many users will be online. You can see how big the accounting packets are. After that, calculating bandwidth is a simple multiplication. Alan DeKok.
On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 11:28 PM, Alan DeKok<aland@deployingradius.com> wrote:
Deepak wrote:
Thanks for info I needed. I got the hardware part. Regarding the bandwidth in router, how much bandwidth is needed (rough estimate) given that thousands of users are online and radius is continuously getting accounting packets from various APs?
It's up to YOU.
You can set the accounting update interval for one user. You can see how many users will be online. You can see how big the accounting packets are.
After that, calculating bandwidth is a simple multiplication.
Alan DeKok. - List info/subscribe/unsubscribe? See http://www.freeradius.org/list/users.html
I got the idea. Thanks all for your valuable time. -- ============================== Registered Linux User #460714 Currently Using Fedora 10, CentOS 5.3 ==============================
participants (4)
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Alan DeKok -
Deepak -
Igor Smitran -
Padam J Singh