FreeRADIUS

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FreeRADIUS

Developed by	FreeRADIUS Development Team
Latest release	2.0.4 / April 30, 2008
OS	Unix-like
Genre	Radius server
License	GPLv2
Website	www.freeradius.org

FreeRADIUS is a free open source RADIUS server.

It offers an alternative to other enterprise RADIUS servers, as it is one of the most modular and feature-rich RADIUS servers available today. It is said to be the most used RADIUS servers world-wide in terms of number of deployments, and number of users who are authenticated with it every day (see Why We're #1).

It scales from embedded systems with small amounts of memory, to systems with multiple millions of users. It is fast, flexible, configurable, and supports more authentication protocols than many commercial servers. The server comes with a PHP based web user administration tool, called dialupadmin. It is currently used as the foundation for multiple commercial RADIUS products.

It has been written by a team of developers who have decades of collective experience in implementing and deploying RADIUS software, in software engineering, and in Unix package management.

[edit] History

FreeRADIUS was started in August 1999 by Alan DeKok and Miquel van Smoorenburg. Miquel had previously written the Cistron RADIUS server, which had gained wide-spread usage once the Livingston server was no longer being maintained. FreeRADIUS was started to create a new RADIUS server, using a new design that would encourage more active community involvement, and scale to deployments that earlier servers did not handle.

The server quickly gained community support, through the addition of modules to integrate it with LDAP, SQL, and other databases. EAP support was added in late 2001, with PEAP and EAP-TTLS support added in late 2003. The server now supports all common authentication protocols, databases, and vendor dictionaries.

Version 2.0.0 was released in early 2008, and added experimental support for many more EAP types (EAP-FAST, EAP-TNC, etc.). It also added support for Virtual hosting, IPv6, VMPS, and a new policy language that simplifies many complex configurations.