Re: Radius vs Other logins methods (fwd)

Evan Champion (evanc@synapse.net)
Tue, 31 Dec 1996 10:20:19 -0500 (EST)

On Mon, 30 Dec 1996, MegaZone wrote:

> Once upon a time Kelly French shaped the electrons to say...
> >Why use radius?? why not stick with a /etc/passwd file??
>
> If you have a distributed network, RADIUS allows different macines to all
> connect to the same security server easily.
>
> If you're using one Linux box - seems to me /etc/password is easier for
> one box.

The best solution for multi-computer authentication is not RADIUS, but
rather Kerberos. Where RADIUS is nice is that it is a common way of
telling various types of terminal servers configuration information for
dial-in users and accounting for these dial-in users. It is IMHO a
special purpose authenticator (even if it could be used in a more general
setting), whereas Kerberos support is available in almost all system
services (ftp, telnet/rlogin, pop, imap, http, etc.)

Unfortunately Livingston radiusd does not support Kerberos
authentication. When will this be available?

Evan

--
Evan Champion            * Director, Network Operations
mailto:evanc@synapse.net * Directeur, Exploitation du reseau
http://www.synapse.net/  * Synapse Internet