How does Radius work?

[ranj]

Hi everyone. Hope you all had a good new year. Bring on 2008!

I looking into a wireless network at my school and have previously had real bad experience with wireless. The school I previously worked had wireless and I think the reason why it didnt work properly was because they weren't using Commerical access points and stuck with the home based equipment and dotted lots of these around the building. It was a nightmare to administer because you had to keep note of every IP for each AP if you needed to make a change and login to every AP if it was a global change.

I interested in knowing more about RADIUS server setup but the content I am finding online just seems to confuse me. I have a few questions which I hope someone may be able to answer for me:

1. Am I right in saying that if you have a RADIUS server all AP which are radius compatible can be managed from the server end. So for example if I wanted to change the SSID for the whole wireless network I could simply go onto the RADIUS server make a change there and then the server will broadcast this to all the AP's?

2. The authentication part of radius, does this link in with Active Directory?, so if a user wanted to log onto the network they could use their AD account to authenticate and allow access to the wireless network? or does it run on a separate authentication system.

3. Network access control (NAC) is this a CISCO proprietary thing? and can this work with a RADIUS Server.

I appreciate any help on this. If anyone could also point me out with some good companies who may be able to provide me with a solution that would be great.

Your help is appreciated

[spc-rocket]

Hi,

Have a look at this topic:

http://www.edugeek.net/index.php?nam...wtopic&t=14303

Ash.

[ranj]

Do you know I just been looking at that. That is really helpful, Thanks Ashok.

[contink]

There's a lot of discussion about Radius at the moment so a quick search using "radius" as a keyword should help with this.