[EXT] Using netbox as a backend for FreeRADIUS

[Arran Cudbard-Bell]

It's a limitation of HTTP/1.1.  You need a connection for each HTTP request in flight.

The rlm_rest module in v4 supports HTTP/2.0, so it can multiplex (run multiple requests over the same TCP connection simultaneously).

The v4 module is also fully asynchronous, and uses a slab allocator for handles to minimise runtime memory allocations.  It's about as good as it gets for a libcurl based implementation.

On the commercial side (InkBridge), we've also integrated Netbox to do static IP assignment for our LDAP subscriber management API, it's very nice :)

-Arran


> On 10 Mar 2025, at 13:12, Brian Julin <BJulin at clarku.edu> wrote:
> 
> Michael Schwartzkopff wrote:
>> I jusst published a blog article how to use netbox as a backend for
>> FreeRADIUS to lookup MAC addresses for MAC-bypass. It is a nice exercise
>> of the use of the rest module of FreeRADIUS.
> 
> Nice... yes netbox is a pretty easy REST target.  I'd encourage a test environment with
> it though as the netbox devs like to... change stuff... a lot.
> 
> Also, last time I looked at rlm_rest I was a bit concerned about the number of connections
> it seems to want to keep running.  Maybe overly so... there isn't much of a guide about
> whether every thread really needs a connection or whatnot.  Consolidated all transactions
> into an SQL database to eliminate races and batched them up from a single-connection
> REST script instead.
> 
> A linux box running netbox won't be bothered very much by this but with some appliances
> there's a pretty low limit on the number of REST connections allowed, so if you have a lot
> of services/servers trying to hit something over REST any extra connections can add up fast.
> 
> Maybe I misunderstand the way REST uses connections or maybe FR4 has improvements
> in sharing live connections between threads.
> 
> -
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Arran Cudbard-Bell <a.cudbardb at freeradius.org>
FreeRADIUS Development Team

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