Comments

1. Christian says:

   28 February 2008 at 01:52

   I’ve recently ran into the same prob­lem.. very annoying

   BUT —  I have got­ten basic Radius work­ing fine

   also — F5 is a few years ahead of ace, i use ace’s too for vir­tu­al­ized cus­tomer infrastructures

   The ACE is no com­pet­i­tion for the F5 IMO, but i would really like to see F5 imple­ment TACACS very soon

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2. Don MacVittie says:

   28 February 2008 at 21:52

   Good Faith Disclosure: I am an F5 employee, one of the ones “…con­cen­trat­ing on nifty fea­tures…”

   I’ll give you that it’s incon­veni­ent not to have Radius do it for you (and prior to my employ­ment at F5 have ran­ted about this in data cen­ter devices and appli­ances in gen­eral — and stor­age in par­tic­u­lar), but there are two simple facts:

   (1) The data cen­ter is sadly filled with devices and appli­ances that still don’t sup­port Radius, F5 is hardly unique in that sense.

   (2) F5 does a very good job of listen­ing to cus­tom­ers — that is one of the reas­ons I came to the company.

   When cus­tom­ers are asked where devel­op­ment time should be spent, Radius always loses. It always loses because for most organ­iz­a­tions it is a minor impos­i­tion and they can get big­ger bang for their buck if we imple­ment things like Powershell and Control Point. We give the cus­tom­ers what they want — ask­ing them would be a waste of time if we didn’t listen.

   That doesn’t make it less incon­veni­ent — par­tic­u­larly on ini­tial setup — but for most cus­tom­ers that incon­veni­ence is a min­imal part of over­all con­fig­ur­a­tion cost and effort. For those it isn’t, they get basic Radius con­figured, as Christian mentions.

   Remember that this is not core func­tion­al­ity for these products — a dif­fer­en­ti­ator def­in­itely, but not gen­er­ally a buy/​no buy decision point.

   Don.

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3. Greg Ferro says:

   28 February 2008 at 22:10

   Thanks for your response. I have two points.

   I dis­agree with you on point 1, my data cen­ter is filled with products that do sup­port author­iz­a­tion usu­ally RADIUS or TACACS, but some­times LDAP. In fact, I can’t think of any other product that does not have external author­iz­a­tion. But then, I believe myself to be a pro­fes­sional and I make secur­ity con­scious choices.

   I can see why RADIUS would lose in the devel­op­ment cycle and your point appears valid in this con­text. Let me make this point, if F5 can’t get the basic func­tions in place, how are they going to deliver the main functions ?

   To put it dif­fer­ently, listen­ing to cus­tom­ers when they SAY what they want, and fail­ing to address fun­da­ment­als (or what they actu­ally need) can lead to poor choices. Everyone says they want junk food, even when they know its the wrong choice.

   Addiitonally, I have been ask­ing for Radius authen­tic­a­tion for years, and I am not alone. Check the for­ums for the ‘me too’ on my post. Which cus­tom­ers have you been listen­ing to ?

   Develop all the fancy fea­tures you like, but lets not for­get fun­da­ment­als here. F5 has abrog­ated a primary secur­ity respons­ib­il­ity and it should be addressed.

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