Building FreeRADIUS

Supported Platforms

FreeRADIUS is known to run on a large number of 32 and 64bit platforms, however building on some of them may require following special procedures here

Building from Source

If your operating system has support for a package manager such as .deb or .rpm file format, we recommend that you follow the instructions in the next section instead:

tar zxvf freeradius-<version>.tar.gz
./configure
make
su - root
make install

Don't forget to read supplied documentation first, including the configuration files. As with many free software projects, FreeRADIUS could use more documentation. Until such documentation is available, the only place that configuration items are documented is in the configuration files themselves.

If you have problems when trying to run FreeRADIUS, and you see error messages like:

rlm_sql: Could not link driver rlm_sql_mysql: file not found

Then the shared libraries on your system are misconfigured.

Building on MAC OSX

./configure --enable-developer
make
sudo make install

and freeradius runs and responds to radtest.

Building on Solaris

Please see: Solaris

Building Packages

If your operating system has a packaging system (dpkg, rpm, tgz), its usually better to install the appropriate packages instead of directly installing from source.

Note: Pre-built binary packages are available for a number of operating systems.

It's usually easier and more reliable to use pre-built packages from standard repositories of the operating system vendor. Build your own packages only if you cannot find the former.

Building Debian packages

If you're using _Debian GNU/Linux_, you should first check whether your desired version of FreeRADIUS is available in the Debian package repositories, because that will save you the trouble of building packages yourself.

Please see: http://packages.debian.org/freeradius

For instructions how to set up Debian backports, see: Debian

It is possible to build FreeRADIUS packages from the source, using dpkg-buildpackage. Using packages avoids installing directly from source, which would confuse dpkg about the files installed on the system and make it impossible to uninstall the files later.

tar zxf freeradius-server-2.X.Y.tar.gz
cd freeradius-server-2.X.Y
fakeroot dpkg-buildpackage -b -uc
sudo dpkg -i ../*freeradius*_2.X.Y-*_*.deb

If you don't have dpkg-buildpackage do the following:

apt-get install dpkg-dev

If you don't have a pre-requisite package, dpkg-buildpackage will warn you. Install any listed packages that are missing, or run:

apt-get build-dep freeradius

If you build the package as root -- which is not recommended! -- omit the fakeroot and sudo from the above calls.
The default Debian / Ubuntu build rules include OpenSSL support. As of version 2.1.8, OpenSSL support is included by default in the debian build rules shipped with FreeRADIUS, but it still requires you to install the OpenSSL libraries manually. Version 2.1.9 does not have this problem. Using pre-built packages also avoids this problem. You can install the needed OpenSSL libraries by doing:

apt-get install libssl-dev

Building Debian packages with Oracle support.

If you wish to use Oracle you will need to recompile FreeRADIUS on a machine that has Oracle development libraries installed. FreeRADIUS is known to work both with a full Oracle installation as well as with the Oracle Instant Client SDK. Once built the resulting DEB packages can be deployed with just the Oracle Instant Client (No need for the SDK on production machines)

Basicly, you'll need to add dpkg files in order to build a freeradius-oracle package, add the '--with-rlm_sql_oracle', '--with-oracle-include-dir=', '--with-oracle-lib-dir=' (pointing to your oracle installation directory) and 'freeradius-oracle' to the modulelist in debian/rules. Here are more detailled instructions on how to build debian package of freeradius with Oracle support

Building Ubuntu packages

If you're using Ubuntu, you should first check whether your desired version of FreeRADIUS is available in the Ubuntu package repositories, because that will save you the trouble of building packages yourself.

Please see: http://packages.ubuntu.com/freeradius

For build instructions, please see the Debian section immediately above.

Building RedHat packages

Please refer to the information on the Red Hat specific page Red Hat FAQ.

Building SUSE packages

On SUSE Linux it should be a simple matter of taking the latest FreeRADIUS release tarball and dropping it in /usr/src/packages/SOURCES along with the other files from the suse/ directory inside the tarball with the exception of freeradius.spec which goes in /usr/src/packages/SPECS

Then simply run:

rpmbuild -ba /usr/src/packages/SPECS/freeradius.spec

rpmbuild will tell you if you are missing any build dependencies. If so, simply install them with yast2 -i packagename-devel then rerun rpmbuild

Building SUSE packages with Oracle Support

If you wish to use Oracle you will need to recompile FreeRADIUS on a machine that has Oracle development libraries installed. FreeRADIUS is known to work both with a full Oracle installation as well as with the Oracle Instant Client SDK. Once built the resulting RPM package can be deployed with just the Oracle Instant Client (No need for the SDK on production machines)

Most rpm packages available do not included oraclesql.conf due to the fact that they also don't contain the Oracle driver module (due to copyright reasons)

On SUSE Linux if you have the Oracle header files in a sane location it should be a simple matter of taking the latest FreeRADIUS release tarball and dropping it in /usr/src/packages/SOURCES along with the other files from the suse/ directory inside the tarball with the exception of freeradius.spec which goes in /usr/src/packages/SPECS

Then edit /usr/src/packages/SPECS/freeradius.spec and change:

%define _oracle_support 0

to:

%define _oracle_support 1