FR on RHEL

[John Dennis]

On 05/24/2012 07:22 AM, Tobias Hachmer wrote:
> Hello list,
>
> the red hat faq on http://wiki.freeradius.org/Red-Hat-FAQ supposes that
> the newest version of FR is in the official channel.
> Here on a RHEL6 server there is only version 2.1.10 in the repo (and
> only the base package, not the additional modules like mysql, ldap and
> so on):

If the FAQ suggests the latest version of FreeRADIUS will always be 
available on RHEL then that is erroneous. If you could point out what 
made you believe that I'll edit the FAQ.

However we do a very good job in RHEL with keeping the version of 
FreeRADIUS current given RHEL policies. For stability reasons RHEL 
strongly discourages version upgrades (i.e. rebase). There is also a 
practical limit to how many changes can go into any given RHEL update 
due to the QE and documentation that accompanies every change. We fought 
hard to get special dispensation for FreeRADIUS in RHEL and for the last 
several years we've managed to rebase FreeRADIUS in the quarterly 
updates for RHEL 5 and RHEL 6. For some this might seem like it's no big 
deal, you just rebuild it right? Not in an Enterprise Distribution like 
RHEL, Enterprise has completely different and vastly more stringent 
requirements (one reason whey RHEL and it's clones are so popular). 
Given the difficulty of getting a package rebase into an Enterprise 
release you should not expect every RHEL version to have the latest 
version of FreeRADIUS. In fact any expectation that any RHEL release 
will have the latest release of any package is misplaced, it's 
completely counter to the design goals of RHEL whose preeminent goal is 
stability. This is why what we've done with FreeRADIUS in RHEL is 
exceptional, very few packages get this special treatment.

To answer your specific question, the next RHEL 6 update, 6.3 contains 
the latest FreeRADIUS 2.1.12 release plus a number of bug fixes (some of 
which have already been sent upstream to Alan, some were pulled from 
Alan's git repo, and the remainder will be sent upstream to Alan 
shortly, we always send our fixes upstream in a community minded fashion.

The last update of RHEL 5 also included FreeRADIUS 2.1.12.

All the subpackages for freeradius (e.g. freeradius-mysql) are 
available. If you're not seeing them for some reason please contact your 
RHEL technical support representative, that's what they're there for. 
It's what your paying for with your subscription, use it.

HTH,

John

-- 
John Dennis <jdennis at redhat.com>

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