Re: [Help-gnu-radius] Re: Max users

[Gerald]

On Tue, 22 Oct 2002, Andrew Kohlsmith wrote:

> > P.S. I've got up to 250,000 before at the last ISP I worked at and that
> > takes a lot more creative load balancing and many more radius servers
> > spread out. Disclaimer: that wasn't on gnu-radius though.
>
> I had horrendous problems running MySQL (locking issues, SQL *hanging* issues,
> ugh) -- I dropped MySQL like a bad habit in favour of Postgres which is
> overall faster when inserting the accounting records for over 1000 concurrent
> users (7-8000 subscribers).

At that installation we migrated from Radiator (commercial $$$ software)
with flat text files (ugh) to Radiator/LDAP. LDAP is VERY nice for a back
end to radius. Built in replication that resyncs without issues. The 2
admins that did that migration spent 2-3 months dedicated to the task of
getting that setup so I won't begin to say it's easy. Perhaps LDAP has
come further since then though. I'm waiting for LDAP utilities and the
protocol to grow more before I commit to it though. If I outgrew mysql
here tomorrow I would switch to Postgres and manage replication manually.

I hope (open)LDAP grows to my liking and gnu-radius supports it before I
have to switch again though.

> I am, however, looking for a method to do a hot failover.  I'm trying to do
> something to keep the accounting records intact.  Multiple RADIUS servers
> talking back to a single DB would do it, but Postgres doesn't have a decent
> way to replicate yet.  :-(

I still haven't found a decent way to fill in the gap on accounting when
DB's failover. The 250k installation was still processing flat text logs
with a custom program. I'm not sure the best way to do that without a
custom solution.

I'd be interested in knowing what version of mysql were you using? I've
only heard people talk of issues with it. Never seen details. Perhaps this
part would be better suited off list though since it doesn't relate
directly to gnu-radius.

Gerald