I've read the Cisco documentation on RADIUS and am unclear of a couple of things, Let say I have a network of NT servers and users already connect to the network through a PPP over a VPN. What purpose would a RADIUS server have in this design. They are Authenticated through their NT accounts, am I confused? or Are RADIUS servers used more in an instance of dialing up to a service provider, the logon that you provide to the service provider is saved in the Raduis user database and authenticated on the Raduis server? or am just totally confused!!!!

BF

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BeenFramed

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Radius is the protocol that your network access server could use to speek with the NT domain controller or whatever else you have providing username/password pairs.
Lets say I connect to a vpn concentrator at the office. The VPN concentrator requires me to authenticate at some point but because my username and password aren't stored on the concentrator, it has to reference an external database of some sort like an NT domain controller. Maybe the VPN concentrator is smart enough send usernames and passwords directly to the domain controller just like an NT workstation or something. Great. But if it's not, it could use a protocol like radius to communicate with a radius server which in turn looks at something like the PDC (or an internal database, or NDS or all of the above....)
Does that make any more sense?

MadChef

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