When organizations grow, there becomes more and more systems that need to be maintained, and each may have different configurations and users which have access to them. Individually editing local config files gets old pretty fast for hundred of devices, and developing a unified and central user authorization database system that spans across all types of information systems becomes necessary. Enter: OpenLDAP. I think I've developed a solution to maintain Linux hosts which controls POSIX users/groups/sudo access/apache website access/etc. by using a central LDAP database that stores policies of what a user can do on any one of our PCs. The actual configuration got fairly ugly, though (PAM not allowing you to specify more than one LDAP Group to allow access to the machine, thus the posixGroup LDAP schema had to be used (since /etc/security/access.conf allows you to specify multiple posix group access) instead of groupOfNames, but groupOfNames is needed for apache's ldap auth module, so both must be used..), but I've only covered access management for our websites and Linux PCs, not all of the various routers, switches, or other RADIUS-aware equipment that exist within the organization. Enter: FreeRADIUS. We do already have a FreeRADIUS configuration that is auto-generated by our internal MySQL-based access policies to control access to our networking equipment, although this is fairly ugly, and it would be much much nicer if it could use the LDAP database I'm currently developing to control access across all devices instead. To put it gently, I want FreeRADIUS to be configured *entirely* off of LDAP. We currently have usernames/passwords stored/authenticated from the Kerberos database which FreeRADIUS also uses to authenticate users--I don't have LDAP do this. LDAP simply determines the _authorization_ of the user (what group they are in, what access they are provided) I've read through a few LDAP-FreeRADIUS HOWTOs, but haven't come across anything that suggests FreeRADIUS can do everything I want it to. I interpret FreeRADIUS as having the following constructs: clients (clients.conf): All devices FreeRADIUS will communicate with and provide access to. I don't see any way these can be defined in LDAP instead and have FreeRADIUS pull clients from the database instead of a local file, which is what I want. users: All users which will have some sort of access to one of the clients. It appears users are able to be pulled from the LDAP directory by providing the correct DN users are located in. For me, users are all located in ou=people,dc=grnoc,dc=iu,dc=edu. My personal entry is something like: dn: uid=mrmccrac,ou=people,dc=grnoc,dc=iu,dc=edu objectClass: inetOrgPerson objectClass: posixAccount objectClass: radiusprofile ... uid: mrmccrac I still need to go back and look at the HOWTO perhaps, although I believe this setup can be used somehow/somewhere with FreeRADIUS to have it pull all of our users (specifically uids) from LDAP instead of a local file. This leads me to the next FreeRADIUS construct.. groups (group): this specifies groups of users, which can then later be used to define access levels (in huntgroups?). From what I read this too can be pulled from FreeRADIUS, that is, the groupOfNames object class can be interpreted if you supply the DN which has all of the groups. An example groupOfNames object I currently have is as such: dn: cn=dev,ou=ldapgroups,dc=grnoc,dc=iu,dc=edu cn: dev objectClass: groupOfNames objectClass: top member: uid=mrmccrac,ou-people,dc=grnoc,dc=iu,dc=edu Thus I should be able to tell FreeRADIUS to look at dn: ou=ldapgroups,dc=grnoc,dc=iu,dc=edu, and it should know to look at the member attributes to determine which users DN are in each group it finds. Now, finally... huntgroups: I believe this is the glue between users/groups to RADIUS clients. I think the level of access can be defined per group (which would be ideal), and then with huntgroups we say which groups may get their specified level of access (enable mode or not..) to which networking devices we specified in the clients. Again, like clients.conf, I don't want to have to edit the huntgroups file anytime a change is made, but instead make the change in the LDAP directory and have FreeRADIUS pull all huntgroups from there. Is any/all of what I mentioned currently possible based upon my current setup and FreeRADIUS's capabilities? Or, will all changes to clients and huntgroups need to be made locally in a file on the radius server, but I can at least pull available users and the groups that exist/they belong in from LDAP? Again, we're using Kerberos to do the user/password authentication, but want LDAP to do the authorization schema I provided. Any FreeRADIUS configuration examples/LDIF examples would be greatly appreciated, thanks for reading this far :). Mitch