• Nginx is a web server that is gaining a lot of popularity today.
• It is fresh, lightweight, fast, scales well and is able to take a lot of load without overwhelming your system.
• Nginx is one of those things that will cross any web developer's path sooner or later.
• This section will cover the steps you have to go through to get RADIUSdesk working with a LEMP stack on Ubuntu 16.04
  • * A LEMP stack is one of those acronyms you can impress your friends with. It stands for Linux NginX MySQL and PHP.

• A standard Nginx install on Ubuntu is actually very simple.
• The part that is more involved is to tweak Nginx to do the following:

• We assume you have a clean install of Ubuntu 16.04 WITHOUT Apache installed.

   sudo systemctl start apache2.service
   sudo apt-get remove apache2
 

• Ensure the English language pack is installed

sudo apt-get install language-pack-en-base

• Install Nginx

sudo apt-get install nginx

• Ensure the web server starts up and is running

sudo systemctl stop nginx.service
sudo systemctl start nginx.service

• Navigate to the IP Address of the server where you installed Nginx using a browser to ensure Nginx serves content e.g. http://127.0.0.1
• The default directory where Nginx serves its content from on Ubuntu is /var/www/html.
• Since RADIUSdesk has been developed over a couple of years, it was traditionally served by Nginx from the /usr/share/nginx/html directory. (This was on Ubunut 14.04).
• Edit the default server file:

 sudo vi /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default
 

• Change the value of root:

#root /var/www/html;
root /usr/share/nginx/html;

• The default install of Nginx does not support the serving of .php files.
• We will install a program (actually a service) called php-fpm.
• This service will listen for requests to interpret.
• Install the php-fpm service:

sudo apt-get install php-fpm

• Now that the php-fpm service is installed we should change the default Nginx server to make use of it.
• Edit the default server file:

    sudo vi /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default

• Add index.php to this line:

    #add index.php
    index index.php index.html index.htm;

• Activate PHP precessing by uncommenting this this section. Note that we use the UNIX socket:

    # pass the PHP scripts to FastCGI server listening on 127.0.0.1:9000
    #
    location ~ \.php$ {
                include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
        #
        #       # With php7.0-cgi alone:
        #       fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
        #       # With php7.0-fpm:
                fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php7.0-fpm.sock;
        }

• Enable the hiding of .htaccess files

    # deny access to .htaccess files, if Apache's document root
    # concurs with nginx's one
    #
    location ~ /\.ht {
        deny all;
    }

• Reload the Nginx web server's configuration

sudo systemctl reload nginx.service

• Create a test .php file to confirm that it does work

sudo vi /usr/share/nginx/html/test.php

• Contents:

    <?php
        phpinfo();
    ?>

• Navigate to http://127.0.0.1/test.php and see if the page display the PHP info.

• Be sure to supply a root password for the MySQL database when asked for it if you are security conscious else simply hit the ESC key.

sudo apt-get install mysql-server php-mysql

• With the 16.04 release of MySQL there were some changes to the MySQL configuration which causes problems on the current RADIUSdesk database implementation.
• We will disable Strict SQL Mode in MySQL 5.7.

sudo vi /etc/mysql/conf.d/disable_strict_mode.cnf

• Enter these two lines:

[mysqld]
sql_mode=IGNORE_SPACE,NO_ZERO_IN_DATE,NO_ZERO_DATE,ERROR_FOR_DIVISION_BY_ZERO,NO_AUTO_CREATE_USER,NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION

• Save the file and restart the MySQL service

sudo systemctl restart mysql.service

• Edit the /etc/nginx/sites-available/default file:

sudo vi /etc/nginx/sites-available/default

• Add the following inside the server section:

location ~* ^.+\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|js|css)$ {
    rewrite ^/cake2/rd_cake/webroot/(.*)$ /cake2/rd_cake/webroot/$1 break;
    rewrite ^/cake2/rd_cake/(.*)$ /cake2/rd_cake/webroot/$1 break;
    access_log off;
    expires max;
    add_header Cache-Control public;
}

• Reload Nginx:

sudo systemctl reload nginx.service

• Edit the main config file of Nginx.

sudo vi /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

• Change the compression section to contain the following:

gzip on;
gzip_disable "msie6";

gzip_vary on;
gzip_proxied any;
gzip_comp_level 6;
gzip_buffers 16 8k;
gzip_http_version 1.1;
gzip_types text/plain text/css application/json application/javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;

• Restart Nginx

sudo systemctl restart nginx.service

• The first part prepared everything to install RADIUSdesk. This part will go through the steps to install the latest RADIUSdesk.
• RADIUSdesk consists of three components.
  • rd directory with its contents contains all the HTML and JavaScript code and is used as the presentation layer.
  • rd_cake is a CakePHP application and can be considered the engine room. Here the data is processed before being presented by the presentation layer.
  • rd_login is a directory with various login pages which are centrally managed through the RADIUSdesk Dynamic Login Pages applet. Although this is optional, it is used by most installs.

• We will use SVN (subversion) to check out the latest version (trunk) of RADIUSdesk.

• Make sure the following packages are installed:

sudo apt-get install php-cli php-gd php-curl php-xml

• Download the 2.x version of CakePHP (Version 29.1 as of this writing). https://github.com/cakephp/cakephp/tags
• There are two formats to choose from when selecting to download, Zip or Tar.gz. Select Tar.gz.
• Copy and extract it inside the directory that Nginx is serving its content from (/usr/share/nginx/html)

sudo cp 2.9.1.tar.gz /usr/share/nginx/html
cd /usr/share/nginx/html
sudo tar -xzvf 2.9.1.tar.gz 
sudo ln -s ./cakephp-2.9.1 ./cake2

• Reload php7.0-fpm

sudo systemctl reload php7.0-fpm.service

• Install subversion in order for you to check out the latest source for RADIUSdesk.

sudo apt-get install subversion

• Check out the rd_cake branch from trunk to /usr/share/nginx/html.

cd /usr/share/nginx/html/cake2
sudo svn checkout svn://dvdwalt@svn.code.sf.net/p/radiusdesk/code/trunk/rd_cake ./rd_cake

• Change the following directories to be writable by www-data:

sudo chown -R www-data. /usr/share/nginx/html/cake2/rd_cake/tmp
sudo chown -R www-data. /usr/share/nginx/html/cake2/rd_cake/Locale
sudo chown -R www-data. /usr/share/nginx/html/cake2/rd_cake/webroot/img/flags
sudo chown -R www-data. /usr/share/nginx/html/cake2/rd_cake/webroot/img/nas
sudo chown -R www-data. /usr/share/nginx/html/cake2/rd_cake/webroot/img/realms
sudo chown -R www-data. /usr/share/nginx/html/cake2/rd_cake/webroot/img/dynamic_details
sudo chown -R www-data. /usr/share/nginx/html/cake2/rd_cake/webroot/img/dynamic_photos
sudo chown -R www-data. /usr/share/nginx/html/cake2/rd_cake/webroot/files/imagecache

• Create the following blank database:

sudo su
mysql -u root
create database rd;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON rd.* to 'rd'@'127.0.0.1' IDENTIFIED BY 'rd';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON rd.* to 'rd'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'rd';
exit;

• Populate the database (trunk):

    mysql -u root rd < /usr/share/nginx/html/cake2/rd_cake/Setup/Db/rd.sql

USE rd;
DELETE FROM phrase_values WHERE language_id=16 OR language_id=15 OR language_id=13 OR language_id=5 OR language_id=14;

• Since CakePHP uses rewrite rules, we have to configure Nginx in such a way as to allow rewriting of the URL's that starts with /cake2/rd_cake.
• Edit /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default

    sudo vi /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default

• Add the following section inside the server section:

location /cake2/rd_cake {
     rewrite ^/cake2/rd_cake/(.*)$ /cake2/rd_cake/webroot/$1 break;
     try_files $uri $uri/ /cake2/rd_cake/webroot/index.php?q=$uri&$args;
}

• Reload the Nginx web server:

   sudo systemctl reload nginx.service

• RADIUSdesk supports multiple languages which are sourced during loading. To confirm that the CakePHP application is working as intended, go to this URL:

http://127.0.0.1/cake2/rd_cake/phrase_values/get_language_strings.json?_dc=1355816922405&language=

• Your browser should show a JSON encrypted string:

    {"data":{"phrases":{"spclCountry":"United Kingdom","spclLanguage":"English","sUsername":"......,"success":true}

• Congratulations you are almost there. Next we will install the viewer component

• Check out the latest code of the viewer component under the /usr/share/nginx/html/ directory:

cd /usr/share/nginx/html/
sudo svn checkout svn://dvdwalt@svn.code.sf.net/p/radiusdesk/code/trunk/rd ./rd

• For the viewer component you need the ExtJS toolkit. We've added version 6.2.0 to the SVN repository for easy download
• Checkout and unzip the GPL version under the /usr/share/nginx/html/rd directory. NOTE: This is a single big file which will take some time to download over slow connections.

cd /usr/share/nginx/html/
sudo svn checkout svn://svn.code.sf.net/p/radiusdesk/code/extjs ./
sudo mv  ext-6-2-sencha_cmd.tar.gz ./rd
cd /usr/share/nginx/html/rd
sudo tar -xzvf ext-6-2-sencha_cmd.tar.gz

• Now try to log in on the following URL with username root and password admin: http://127.0.0.1/rd/build/production/Rd/index.html
• Alternatively (also if you do not have Internet Access on the machine) use this URL which is a bit slower: http://127.0.0.1/rd/index.html?cache

• RADIUSdesk requires a few scripts to run periodically in order to maintain a healthy and working system.
• To activate the cron scripts execute the following command, which will add RADIUSdesk's crons scripts to the Cron system

sudo cp /usr/share/nginx/html/cake2/rd_cake/Setup/Cron/rd /etc/cron.d/

• If you want to change the default intervals at which the scripts get executed, just edit the /etc/cron.d/rd file.

• Be sure to also install FreeRADIUS and Node.js,
• Install FreeRADIUS
• Install node.js