(RADIATOR) A radius enabled HTTP port/redirector

[Mike McCauley]

Hello All,

we have been working on the prototype of a radius-enabled port redirector.

It does Radius authentication of 
each incoming HTTP request, transparently redirects the HTTP stream to a 
configurable server and port, and sends accounting start and stop requests 
(with the authenticated user name) to the radius server.

The idea is you can put it in front of your HTTP content servers, such as for 
streaming media, then use it to manage access and billing for content.


There are some interesting ideas and opportunities for content providers.


1. You could use a standard ISP Radius billing package (like platypus, rodopi 
etc) to manage access and billing of your content. Since the accounting 
requests have 
username and Acct-Session-Time in them, then standard time-based billing could 
be done.

2. Using Radius reply attributes, you could limit yor streaming sessions to a 
maximum time, possibly limited to the amount of time prepaid by the customer 
(administered as prepaid time in your billing software). So you could arrange 
for certain customers not to overspend their enitlements. You may also be 
able to apply limits on the maximum delivered data volume at any one time.

3. You could specify the target server and port of the redirection based on 
Radius reply attrtibutes during the authentication. That means you could 
configure (in Radius/ISP billing) the server and port to connect to on a 
user-by-user basis, perhaps premium customers could get connected to a server 
on a fast/lightly loaded box for better performance, or a higher quality 
feed? Or choose the server based on whats been paid for? Or redirect 
unauthenticated users to somewhere else? Lots of 
possibilities.

4. Radius could be configured to permit at most one concurrent user with a 
given user name (or 2 or 3 or ...) so you could limit the maximum number of 
concurrent users a customer will permit at a given time?


5. This could be a fontend forcontent  served up by other third 
parties: all your customers connect to you, then you redirect to a 
configurable third party, measure the delivered content, then charge your 
customers and pay the third party.

Anyone interested in this?
Please respond direct to me.

Cheers.



-- 
Mike McCauley                               mikem at open.com.au
Open System Consultants Pty. Ltd            Unix, Perl, Motif, C++, WWW
24 Bateman St Hampton, VIC 3188 Australia   http://www.open.com.au
Phone +61 3 9598-0985                       Fax   +61 3 9598-0955

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