Chapter 11. Dictionaries

At the start of the book we looked at the RADIUS protocol and discovered that each RADIUS packet used by the RADIUS protocol consists of Attribute Value Pairs (AVPs) to convey information. Each AVP inside a RADIUS packet contains a type, length, and value field. The type field consists of an integer number representing a specific attribute. FreeRADIUS uses dictionaries to map these type numbers to attribute names.

This chapter explains how to manage the dictionaries. In this chapter we shall:

• See why we need dictionaries
• Update pre-defined dictionaries according to best practices
• Discuss the format of a dictionary file

So let's get on with it...