Looking at the title, you might say: “Not another openssl certificate generation guide!”. I know, I know, but I promise that I will try to be different here.

Indeed, there are abundant resources available on how to use openssl to generate digital certificates and I have learned a lot from them. However, I don’t think it is easy for all of us to memorize the complicated openssl command line syntax.

In Part I, I have shown what I did to get the build and installation going. In Part II, I will show what steps I took to get a simplest test like the following done: A EAP-MD5 test that involves an OpenDiameter server (aaad), an OpenDiameter client (nasd), and a EAP-MD5 client (pacd) talking to nasd using PANA. All three parties reside on one single host.

Simple as the test is, a lot of work is needed in OpenDiameter’s case, as we will see soon.

Some Background Information

The Diameter Protocol

Diameter is a AAA protocol that is supposed to be the successor to RADIUS, and OpenDiameter is an open source implementation of the Diameter Protocol. I recently started playing around with OpenDiameter and, to my surprise, the online resources and documentations on how to use it are very hard to find, if there is any. I figured out my way to get the basics running, and I am here to share my initial experiences, hoping to help other OpenDiameter beginners. I also hope that the OpenDiameter community could contribute more

Introduction

If you are like me and need to set up a FreeRADIUS server for EAP authentications every so often, each time do you also find yourself having a little hard time trying to refresh your memory? Well, after that happened to me for a couple of times, I found that a incremental and systematic way of setting up and testing FreeRADIUS server could make it easier to remember and easier to debug. Here is what I do and I hope it can benefit others as well.

Step 1. Set up and test local authentication without EAP, using radtest tool.