Custom Dictionaries and Attributes

Goal: To understand how the dictionaries affect the server and to create a new vendor-specific dictionary with a number of custom attributes; also, to test those attributes in the server.

Time: 20-30 minutes

File:

man page: dictionary

The dictionary files used by FreeRADIUS form the basis for mapping protocol numbers to humanly readable text. These dictionary files are ASCII and may be edited to add, delete, or update entries. For this exercise, you will create a custom dictionary and will send the attributes to the server using a RADIUS test client.

You should first familiarize yourself with the man page for the "dictionary" file.

You should create a file called dictionary.test in the appropriate directory and populate it with a "test" vendor, using a vendor ID of 123456. This dictionary file should be referenced from the main dictionary file. You should verify that the server starts successfully with the new dictionary file, even when the new dictionary is empty.

You should now stop the server and add a number of vendor specific attributes to the "test" dictionary, as follows:

Once the attributes and values are added to the dictionary.test file, re-start the server. Using a RADIUS client, send the server an authentication request for user "bob", containing one of each attribute. Verify that the attributes are printed as names, not numbers.

Edit the file, and update the entry for user "bob" to reply with the attributes and with four names for "people to eat with". Re-send the authentication request for user "bob", and verify that the access accept contains the expected attributes.