RADIUS.CONF(5) BSD File Formats Manual RADIUS.CONF(5)NAMEradius.conf — RADIUS client configuration file
SYNOPSIS
/etc/radius.conf
DESCRIPTIONradius.conf contains the information necessary to configure the RADIUS
client library. It is parsed by rad_config(3). The file contains one or
more lines of text, each describing a single RADIUS server which will be
used by the library. Leading white space is ignored, as are empty lines
and lines containing only comments.
A RADIUS server is described by three to five fields on a line:
Service type
Server host
Shared secret
Timeout
Retries
The fields are separated by white space. The ‘#’ character at the begin‐
ning of a field begins a comment, which extends to the end of the line.
A field may be enclosed in double quotes, in which case it may contain
white space and/or begin with the ‘#’ character. Within a quoted string,
the double quote character can be represented by ‘\"’, and the backslash
can be represented by ‘\\’. No other escape sequences are supported.
The first field gives the service type, either ‘auth’ for RADIUS authen‐
tication or ‘acct’ for RADIUS accounting. If a single server provides
both services, two lines are required in the file. Earlier versions of
this file did not include a service type. For backward compatibility, if
the first field is not ‘auth’ or ‘acct’ the library behaves as if ‘auth’
were specified, and interprets the fields in the line as if they were
fields two through five.
The second field specifies the server host, either as a fully qualified
domain name or as a dotted-quad IP address. The host may optionally be
followed by a ‘:’ and a numeric port number, without intervening white
space. If the port specification is omitted, it defaults to the ‘radius’
or ‘radacct’ service in the /etc/services file for service types ‘auth’
and ‘acct’, respectively. If no such entry is present, the standard
ports 1812 and 1813 are used.
The third field contains the shared secret, which should be known only to
the client and server hosts. It is an arbitrary string of characters,
though it must be enclosed in double quotes if it contains white space.
The shared secret may be any length, but the RADIUS protocol uses only
the first 128 characters. N.B., some popular RADIUS servers have bugs
which prevent them from working properly with secrets longer than 16
characters.
The fourth field contains a decimal integer specifying the timeout in
seconds for receiving a valid reply from the server. If this field is
omitted, it defaults to 3 seconds.
The fifth field contains a decimal integer specifying the maximum number
of attempts that will be made to authenticate with the server before giv‐
ing up. If omitted, it defaults to 3 attempts. Note, this is the total
number of attempts and not the number of retries.
Up to 10 RADIUS servers may be specified for each service type. The
servers are tried in round-robin fashion, until a valid response is
received or the maximum number of tries has been reached for all servers.
The standard location for this file is /etc/radius.conf. But an alter‐
nate pathname may be specified in the call to rad_config(3). Since the
file contains sensitive information in the form of the shared secrets, it
should not be readable except by root.
FILES
/etc/radius.conf
EXAMPLES
# A simple entry using all the defaults:
acct radius1.domain.com OurLittleSecret
# A server still using the obsolete RADIUS port, with increased
# timeout and maximum tries:
auth auth.domain.com:1645 "I can't see you" 5 4
# A server specified by its IP address:
auth 192.168.27.81 $X*#..38947ax-+=
SEE ALSOlibradius(3)
C. Rigney, et al, Remote Authentication Dial In User Service (RADIUS),
RFC 2138.
C. Rigney, RADIUS Accounting, RFC 2139.
AUTHORS
This documentation was written by John Polstra, and donated to the
FreeBSD project by Juniper Networks, Inc.
BSD October 30, 1999 BSD
