(RADIATOR) Need Help with Radius Load Balance

[Hugh Irvine]

Hello Andy -

Load balancing can be tricky as you have discovered.

Ideally you want to do forwarding on the basis of minimum response time.

We have used both Alteon and F5 load balancers in the past, as well  
as the Radiator modules.

The F5's are very good, but they are also the most expensive - you  
can do all sorts of amazing things with them though!

The Alteons are getting rather old these days, but they still work.

And as you say, you can simply use the AuthBy LOADBALANCE module in  
Radiator.

The usual setup is two load balancers (primary and secondary RADIUS  
targets for the NAS devices) in front of two groups of RADIUS servers.

The Radiator hosts doing the loadbalancing don't have to be anything  
special, as all they are doing is fairly simple proxying of RADIUS  
requests.

BTW - we are available on a contract basis for design, implementation  
and training as required.

regards

Hugh


On 26 Sep 2007, at 17:07, Andy Saykao wrote:

> Hi Forum,
>
> I've been trying to investigate various radius load balance solutions
> for our current network.
>
> Basically the way our network is set up is as follows:
>
> [user's PC] -> [adsl modem] -> [telco cloud] -> [ ISP cloud (LNS ->
> core-router -> radius server farm) ] -> [Internet]
>
> 1. Cisco IOS SLB
>
> We've tried to implement Cisco's IOS SLB on our core-router but found
> out that this was not an effective solution because the sticky  
> database
> used to ensure that auth and accounting information goto the same  
> radius
> server did not work the way we expected. The sticky database only maps
> LNS IP to a radius server and not the user's framed-ip address or
> username. This meant that all new users who landed on a LNS where  
> there
> was already an existing sticky entry for that LNS on the core-router
> would just goto the same radius server as per the sticky entry.
> Therefore, it wasn't really performing any load balancing.
>
> 2. load-balance method least-outstanding
>
> Next we tried implementing load balancing on the LNS with another  
> Cisco
> IOS solution using the command "load-balance method least- 
> outstanding".
> This way looked promising at first but after further testing we found
> several IOS bugs in the IOS train with this feature set and this
> solution was scrapped.
>
> 3. Radiator Load Balance Solution
>
> I am also aware that radiator itself can provide a load balancing
> solution and this is my next port of call. I've read the literature at
> http://www.open.com.au/radiator/ref.html#pgfId=415205 and just  
> wanted to
> clarify a few things.
>
> Based on our current network set up, would we need to have another
> server running radiator sit in between our core-router and radius  
> server
> farm to do the radius proxying OR can something be done with the
> existing radius servers in the server farm where somehow they can  
> be set
> up to talk amongst each other and spread the load?
>
> Are there any other load balancing alternatives that anyone can see
> based on our current network set up?
>
> Thank you for everyone's help.
>
> Cheers.
>
> Andy
>
> P.s: This might be a repeat post, so apologies in advance.
>
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NB:

Have you read the reference manual ("doc/ref.html")?
Have you searched the mailing list archive (www.open.com.au/archives/ 
radiator)?
Have you had a quick look on Google (www.google.com)?
Have you included a copy of your configuration file (no secrets),
together with a trace 4 debug showing what is happening?
Have you checked the RadiusExpert wiki:
http://www.open.com.au/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

-- 
Radiator: the most portable, flexible and configurable RADIUS server
anywhere. Available on *NIX, *BSD, Windows, MacOS X.
Includes support for reliable RADIUS transport (RadSec),
and DIAMETER translation agent.
-
Nets: internetwork inventory and management - graphical, extensible,
flexible with hardware, software, platform and database independence.
-
CATool: Private Certificate Authority for Unix and Unix-like systems.


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