RADIUS

Monitoring FreeRADIUS

Part of proactive system administration is monitoring for problems before they occur. While you, as the administrator, are probably at your office and within reach of the RADIUS server for 8-12 hours a day, the remaining hours aren’t devoid of users who depend on your service. What happens when (not if) your FreeRADIUS server has a problem and you’re not around?

This section describes using some freely available tools to set up FreeRADIUS such that if it happens to shut down because of an error, it automatically restarts. While it’s still your responsibility to troubleshoot the problem, it does recover the service so you don’t have to deal with angry users calling because they can’t get on the Internet.

Let’s use Dan Bernstein’s DaemonTools package, and in particular, its “supervise” service to monitor radiusd. To get started, surf to the DaemonTools web site at http://cr.yp.to/daemontools.html, download the package, and install it. Dan has complete installation instructions on his site as well as a good deal more documentation that outlines and details the capabilities of DaemonTools. That’s beyond the scope of this application, but it’s likely you can find a use for some of the service management that DaemonTools provides.

Once the tools are installed, you need to create a RADIUS service directory that DaemonTools can use. It’s common practice to place this directory on the /var partition in the svc directory, although it can be placed anywhere you choose. ...