Background: we use freeradius to provide AAA for our wireless hotspots. We would also like to use radius authentication for our layer 3 switches. This brings up the question of security.

Which is going to be more secure, md5 hashed passwords in MySQL, or storing the passwords for the switch accounts in the /etc/shadow file (I had to set the file to world readable to allow the radiusd process to read the file…). Or is there another, better alternative that I just don’t know about?

Ben Wiechman

Wisper High Speed Internet

Office: 866.394.7737

Direct: 320.256.0184

Cell: 320.247.3224

ben@wisper-wireless.com