RADIUS

RADIUS and Availability

High availability has become the latest buzzword in Internet service. Advertisements abound for network operation centers (NOCs) with triple-capacity electric generators, dual HVAC systems, geographical dispersion, waterless combustion control, and other facilities to handle problems. While these certainly are methods to obtain and retain high availability, it seems that sometimes people lose sight of the point of such exercises: to maintain the existence and offering of services when others systems on all “sides” of the service are failing. I say “sides” to refer to the hierarchical tree in which most systems reside: there are often machines relying on a specific box, and that box relies on other boxes, and it also may work in tandem with others.

There are several strategies for planning for failure, which is the main tenet in high availability. The one most disaster-planning experts use is to account for what would be a worst-case scenario for your implementation. There are several questions to ask yourself when designing a highly available system:

Am I familiar with the normal traffic and availability of my systems?

Am I aware of the inherent weaknesses my implementation has? You need to know what the normal behavior of your system is when deciding how best to concentrate your efforts to make it available.

Do I have a single point of failure in my network?

That is, is there one device that provides such critical service that if it went down, users could ...