Webserver System Hanging when trying to authenticate.

[A.L.M.Buxey at lboro.ac.uk]

Hi,

> I have seen this problems a few time. I setup a Fedora Core 4 - Freeradius server with apache and when I try to login to the webserver it hangs the webserver. Note in this case the web server and Freeradius are on the same server. But I have also seen it where the web server and freeradius are on two different systems and the web server hangs. I have gotten it to work in the past by stopping the firewall on the radius server and authenticating and then restarting the firewall. And everything works for some reason. Which really seems strange. I am running Fedora Core Linux for the web servers. And Redhat ES4 Linux for the radius servers. 
> 
> I am wondering if this is a known problem and what is the resolution to the problem. 

a quick idea is that the default firewall config is DROPing packets
rather than rejecting them - which means that if it is not configured
correctly, Apache will wait a long time while trying to authenticate
(it'll be in a stuck state) for that thread. the fact that 'stopping
the firewall, then restarting it after authentication is okay'
screams out at me that you havent got your firewall to allow the required
ports through - eg 1812,1813 and 1814 UDP (*NOT* TCP)

Alan