to Radius or not to Radius...that is the question

[techie211]

hey ppl, I'm having quite a few problems with Meru working with a radius 2008 sever. Mainly slow authentication and drive mappings not showing up. I guess my question is, do I even need a radius server for security or otherwise to work with my Meru wireless? does having a radius server 'slow' things down like authentication? I would like to hear from users who have radius setup with Meru or any other wireless network for that matter. The pro's and con's of why a radius sever or why not. any help on this is greatly appreciated. Hopefully I can put this whole radius mystery to rest

 

-Jr

[Michael]

The main advantage of a RADIUS setup, is this allows you to control who has access to your network, but also allows you to monitor usage.

 

Without RADIUS you can only encrypt a wireless network, which to be honest is good enough most schools. Monitoring if required can be performed at the proxy or firewall level.

[matt40k]

Personally we found 802.1x (radius) to be faster then WEP\WPA, always used to have profile\logon timeouts before we moved over. Never used Meru however.

[techie211]

thanks for the replys. I just don't feel comfortable the way our radius is setup. We're running 3 different CA's and I was told that's the only way the radius server will work with our wireless. Maybe that's true but I don't see why.??? I would like to keep using radius. Does anyone have a written up doc that show's step by step how to setup radius to work with wireless whether it be Meru or another vendor?

[psydii]

Hmm. A three CA (Offline Root, Sub and Issuing) is the 'correct' way to build any enterprise CA, along with an operational policy that aligns to best practice with separate administrators for each one... so unless you are a large org with a large team, or you are using your PKI to sign important documents/code for internal auditing or you are a masochist, that level of PKI is probably overkill. However I'm still using WPA2, so what do I know? We will be going for 802.1x shortly and the design doc proposed only one CA, as I'm getting a 3rd party to do the work I don't have any more detail to give though.

 

Unless you've got your PKI and DNS configurations slightly botched I can't imagine that RADIUS is the root cause of the symptoms you describe. I would look more urgently at the SD version and patching up your clients to have latest tcpip.sys, dhcpcore.dll etc. Then see where you are.

 

Hope this helps.

[alttab]

hey ppl, I'm having quite a few problems with Meru working with a radius 2008 sever. Mainly slow authentication and drive mappings not showing up. I guess my question is, do I even need a radius server for security or otherwise to work with my Meru wireless? does having a radius server 'slow' things down like authentication? I would like to hear from users who have radius setup with Meru or any other wireless network for that matter. The pro's and con's of why a radius sever or why not. any help on this is greatly appreciated. Hopefully I can put this whole radius mystery to rest

 

-Jr

 

the big advantage of radius is in being able to leverage your existing identity infrastructure (AD via a radius server like NPS), the alternative is to use a local database of users stored on your controller which is less than ideal because wherever possible you want to use the security groupings you've created in AD to decide who, what and when get's access. Add to that the ability to then utilise GPO's to assign these security profiles, and all in all it's a far more robust solution than local user databases or on PSK's - which is the most simple level, but has many pitfalls.

[mhowell]

Hi techie211

Please feel free to mail me directly, and we can put you in touch with Meru engineers who will be able to help you. We'll have a significant volume of customers running Meru with radius with no issues, so I am sure we can help

[email protected] Mark Howell

Many thanks

Mark

[techie211]

thanks for all the replies. Also, does the NPS need to be a DC or just a member server?

[MrWu]

thanks for all the replies. Also, does the NPS need to be a DC or just a member server?

 

Can be either way, I have it running on a Hyper-V member server at the moment.