We have the exact same configuration working on another system, but have been unable to get it to work correctly on this Fedora Core 3 system. We are using rlm_sql to have FreeRadius talk to our MSSQL 2000 database. That works. The odd part is on the Fedora Core 3 system it seems to be having issues reading the shared secret. When I start the server in debug mode I get: rlm_sql (sql: Read entry nasname=216.240.101.102,shortname=auth1.virtdom.com,secret=8Y Well this is all good, but the secret is not "8Y". In fact it's more something like cP83ufJu32 The fields are all nvarchar in the database (ip, shortname, secret)... yet ip and shortname display correctly. If I go into the C code for the rlm_sql module and put row[8] in place of row[5] in the debug I get the same thing, even though row[8] has the description of the NAS. If I use tsql to connect to the database and do a select * from my NAS table, all the data comes out right. It seems like something in freeradius is mangeling the sharedsecret. Can anyone shed light on this?