<AuthBy EMERALD> provides authentication and accounting using the
popular Emerald ISP billing package from
IEA website.
The combination of Radiator and Emerald provides a very powerful and easy
to use ISP billing and user management system. You will be able to add
users to Emerald, and have them able to log in immediately. Changing their
password takes effect immediately, and all user logins are available as
soon as they are completed: no need to import accounting files.
Tip
Users of Emerald version 4 should use the <AuthBy
EMERALD4>, following the instructions provided by IEA.
Tip
This AuthBy method will also work for Platypus when it
has its optional RadiusNT compatibility package installed.
Emerald uses Microsoft SQL for its user database, so in order to make
Radiator work with Emerald on Unix, you will usually need to install an
ODBC driver, plus the Perl DBD-ODBC module. Alternatively, you can use the
DBD-Sybase module and the Sybase client libraries. More details on
connectivity between Unix and MS-SQL on NT can be found in the Radiator
FAQ.
During authentication, Radiator checks the password in the Emerald
“masteraccounts” and “subaccounts” tables. It also checks the expiry
dates, extensions and time left. It also gathers radius reply attributes
from the RadConfigs and RadATConfigs tables. The RadATConfigs table (which
contains per-account-type radius reply items) is only consulted if there
are no per-user reply items for the user in the RadConfigs table (but you
can change this behaviour with AddATDefaults. For more information, see
Section 3.45.2.
Tip
By default, AuthBy EMERALD takes no notice of the
LoginLimit from the Emerald database. If you wish to honour it to limit
the maximum number of simultaneous logins for a user, add this to your
Radiator configuration:
# use the LoginLimit from the emerald database
AuthSelect ,sa.LoginLimit
AuthColumnDef 0,Simultaneous-Use,check
<AuthBy EMERALD> does not use the RADIUS client configuration and
secrets entered into the Emerald “Radius Config”. You still need to
configure a <Client> clause in Radiator for each NAS you are going
to use.
<AuthBy EMERALD> will connect to the Emerald database as the user
you specify in the DBUsername parameter. You will probably have to create
such a login in your database, and make sure they are a member of the
Emerald database group.
During accounting, Radiator logs call details from each Accounting
request to the Emerald “Calls” table.
There is an example Radiator configuration file for Emerald in
goodies/emerald.cfg. You should use this as the
starting point for configuring Radiator to work with Emerald.
<AuthBy EMERALD> understands also the same parameters as
<AuthBy SQL>. For more information, see
Section 3.41.
