A user store is a place where user details are kept. It is ideal to have a single user store with different systems making use of this single source. The need in the enterprise for such a store resulted in the directory. Novell's eDirectory, Microsoft's Active Directory, and OpenLDAP are all examples of directories.
In the WWW space popular web environments like Google and Facebook allow third parties to use their user stores through web services. This enables external web applications to use them for authentication.
FreeRADIUS allows us to incorporate external user stores. This reduces the administrative overheads involved with managing users and passwords. The following schematic shows different possibilities when configuring FreeRADIUS:
There are two ways in which FreeRADIUS can utilize user stores for authentication:
- By reading the contents of the store with the help of a FreeRADIUS module. The contents can then be used by other FreeRADIUS modules. The
papmodule...
