RE: Back up server

Jim Dunmyer ( jdunmyer@toltbbs.com )
Sun, 01 Mar 1998 16:27:27 -0500

At 12:54 PM 3/1/98 -0600, you wrote:
>I'll add my 2 cents to this thread..
>
>Our problem seems to be that RADIUS just stops Authenicating BUT does not
>"crash" so the Secondary can take over.. It hasn't happened for a while
>now.. (knock on wood) but it's an interesting problem..
>
I was under the impression that your terminal server will automatically go
to the secondary if the first one isn't responding. We had a hiccup the
other night with our main RADIUS/SQL machine and didn't really realize it
until the next morning when we shut down the backup and authentications
started failing. (!)

Anyway, thanks to folks here, we ended up running the RADUSERS.EXE program
from the iea ftp site. It runs on our backup server every so often
(scheduled with the NT AT thingy). It creates the USERS file, and checks
its validity. This last step is very important! If the primary machine is
down, the file that is created is garbage and unusable by RADIUSNT. We run
a batch file that uses FIND to look for "password" in the new file and exit
with an errorlevel if not found. If if IS found, we COPY the new file to
USERS, then shut down and restart RADIUSNT (it only reads that file at
startup).

Using a central SQL server alone isn't the answer as far as we're
concerned, as you are left with a single point of failure. As it is now,
our SQL server can go up in smoke and we stay online. If worse comes to
worse, I can even add accounts to the USERS file with my favorite editor
while the main SQL/RADIUS/Emerald machine is offline.

<<jdunmyer@toltbbs.com>>