Configuring RADIUS for a dial-up ISP - ISP Series Episode 6

We dive into the world of RADIUS and set up user access control for our dial-up ISP.

Our second channel: @TheParallelPort

#internet #isp #90s

00:00 — Intro
00:36 — AAA
02:29 — Brian Lloyd
04:08 — Livingston RADIUS
08:15 — Modern RADIUS applications
08:46 — Trying out early RADIUS
14:47 — FreeRADIUS
16:36 — Patreon Portal

Huge thanks to:

Downtown Binary for the magical "Astral"

...and S N U G for the lush "Purple Skies"

Above music provided by Lofi Girl.

References:

Lloyd, Brian. (2023). Interview conducted by Serial Port.
Hassell, J. (2003). RADIUS: Securing Public Access to Private Resources. O'Reilly Media.
The Internet. (1995). Stewart Cheifet Productions.
Gilster, P. (1993). The Internet Navigator. Wiley.
Merit Network Inc Press Conference photo. (1987). Bentley Historical Library.
Aupperle, E. M. (1998). Merit — Who, What, and Why. Library Hi Tech, Vol. 16, No. 1.

[RTheren]

We're making a heavy use of both FreeRADIUS and TACACS (only for some specific use-cases) at our datacenter. Funny how simple protocols from 80/90s are still with us and better than ever,

[nickwallette]

I was talking to a cell tech a few years ago, and he was explaining some of the stuff they use. He mentioned "diameter" as the authentication protocol, and I laughed. He gave me a look, like, "... what?" So I said, " 'Diameter'? Like, RADIUS, Diameter...?" The lightbulb went off. "OH.. I never caught that! Huh!"

[donwald]

RADIUS is still critical today for WPA Enterprise, wifi login with credentials.

[holladiewal]

One thing that immediately caught my attention during the compilation of the orignal radiusd, was the "incompatible implicit declaration" errors. This is most likely part of the issue that causes password decryption to fail. This should be relatively easy to fix by adding the approriate header files to be included.

With conf.h being present, maybe this is also where one would usually include headers (and change the options vs. adding them to the Makefile).
Or maybe the version of C compiler this project originally used had some standard includes set that provided the "missing" functions.

[easkay]

Love the reference to clabretro at 1:23! ;D

[KieranMahoney]

Crazy how far radius has come, to go from being one of the most essential parts of an isp to being used at almost every hotel/venue with public wifi

[sardaukar]

It's really great to see the ISP grow. Great videos, guys

[georgegrubbs]

Love the videos and interviews. They create trips through my past career in many ways. Very well done.

[stupossibleify]

Really have enjoyed this entire series - it's managed to answer all those nagging questions I had in the 90s and to this day around an ISPs backend. I always assumed that a given ISP couldn't possibly have an individual physical modern for every user, but that clearly was the case! Great explanation of PPP throughout, that cleared up a lot of mystery and was a "wow" moment for me.

[PatrickBaptist]

Man I started on Prodigy back in the summer of 1993 on a 9600 baud modem lol, ftp/irc/usenet/prodigy chat was the things to do lol. My aunt worked at prodigy and was able to give a couple of fam members free internet, had a limit how many hours can't remember that part but yeah eventually moved on to just a basement local no name ISP (preferred internet was their name, they became notorious in the Tricities TN area)

[treyscarborough]

The amount of hours I spent fighting with radius in the late 90s early 2000s i feel your pain. First was converting SCO Unix slip to ppp with compliling merit radius. Every time my company acquired an isp it seamed each used a different radius server. The craziest was one with a microsoft access database as the backend.

[JimLeonard]

Definitely stepping up your animated graphics :-) Love it.

[MotFPS]

I can't like this enough. The RADIUS GUI you made!! OMG so cool.

[taldmd]

Some trivia, there's an evolution of RADIUS protocol and it's called... DIAMETER. It's mostly supported on 3GPP gear (GGSN, real-time charging) AFAIK and not as well supported in common network stuff as RADIUS.

[IgetTings]

Hey y'all, this is such a cool series! Thanks for doing it 😀

[blackwhitecringy]

Great video as always!, cant wait for the digital saga!

[harryrickenbach]

I have been using Free RADIUS server since 2010 for user access for my Wi-Fi Network started running on a Windows XP machine but now running on a Synology disk station using LDAP database

[shanebaldacchino]

One of the best YouTube channels. Thanks guys.

[moseboy]

That's definitely a worldly choice of User-Password there.

[dann]

I use to work with freeRADUIS doing AAA on cell connections and fibre. This took me back.