Bandwidth & Hardware Requirement Question

[Padam J Singh]

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 at 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
> 
>