Please note that the radiusd does run as user 'radiusd' and group 'radiusd' per default after installation. (/etc/raddb/radiusd.conf) This was done because of security reasons and is possible with many authentication types (users, LDAP, SQL ...) If you would like to use unix (shadow) authentication (Auth-Type = System) or PAM (Auth-Type = Pam) you have to change the values to run the daemon as user/group root: user = root group = root