Installing Freeradius on my cloud server

[Alan DeKok]

On Oct 2, 2019, at 7:18 PM, Tim Dawson <tim at ramasaig.com> wrote:
> I'm entirely new to the whole Captive Portal procedure, but I'm learning about it because I need to control guest access to my newly very fast broadband (4G). As part of that process I thought I'd start by setting up a Freeradius server.
> 
> I run our B&B web site (and several others, for clients) on a cloud server (the OS is Centos 7). Naturally this runs an Apache server, and MySQL. I assumed that the Freeradius server would run alongside these. Is that correct?

  If you want to set it up that way, sure.  The main criteria is that the captive portal is able to send RADIUS packets to the RADIUS server.  Preferably over IPSec, too.

> I set it up via SSH following the 'hard way' described at:
> https://draculaservers.com/tutorials/freeradius-centos-7-mysql/

  If it works, I guess. 

> Everything appeared to go perfectly, to the point where it appeared I could run the Freeradius server in debug mode. Then I spotted that I could no longer log in to my WHM/cPanel, nor could I access several of the hosted web sites. I couldn't allow that situation to continue.
> 
> So I disabled the Freeradius server and the 'firewalld' services. After rebooting the cloud server things cam back to normal.
> 
> I'm not sure, but I suspect the problem may have been in the 'firewalld' settings. Would these have over-ridden the normal server firewall policy? If so, what should I do about it?

  Fix the firewall so that it doesn't block web access?

> I could add the 1812 and 1813 ports to the existing firewall policy, but would that work?

  That won't help for web access.

  It's not really clear what you're doing.  I suspect the underlying issues have nothing to do with FreeRADIUS though.

  Alan DeKok.