That's why I rewrote the critical parts of the Merit RADIUS server to better
fit our needs. Love that source code! The RADIUS idea is excellent, but I
think that the implementations have suffered from not being well suited to
the uses of large ISPs. Of course, if you know C... :).
Hey, NT users! If you ship me a AlphaStation running NT with a full
development environment I'll port RADIUS for you and make the source
public domain. Of course, you won't get the Alpha box back... :)
J> I found it not too difficult to patch the Livingston RADIUS server to
J> honor the User-Service-Type coming from the PM to at least be able to
J> automatically distinguish between shell logins and PPP logins with PAP.
J> So I just have "DEFAULT" and "DEFAULT.ppp" entries in "users", the
J> users don't have to be told to do anything unusual when they log in,
J> they have both shell and PPP access automatically with the same
J> account, and I don't have to maintain the "users" file.
The one really big plus with the Merit RADIUS server is that they have made
it a lot easier to modify to suit the local conditions. I've written
entirely new authentcation and accoutning modules for the Merit RADIUS server
in a couple of weeks of programming... and I got a decent night's sleep every
night, ate well, had the evenings and weekends off, and handled quite a few
technical support calls.
J> The only downside is that SLIP can't be offered automatically, though I
J> see no real need to offer it, and if an exception came up, it could be
J> handled by adding the user to the "users" file.
Personally, I have seen the light! PPP is the way to go, no doubt about it.
I wouldn't be hurt at all if none of our users wanted to use SLIP again!
-- Jeffrey C. Ollie Iowa Network Services System Administrator