Ascend Radius Options

Description

FreeRADIUS uses Vendor-Specific attributes to send the Ascend attributes. By default, Ascend NASes send the Ascend specific attributes as NON VSA’s, which conflict with new RADIUS attributes assigned by the IETF. This was a very bad screw-up by Ascend that still causes many headaches, but sometimes we have to live with it, so we try to cope the best we can.

If you see a large number of messages about invalid Message-Authenticator attribute, you most likely are affected by this problem, and should implement the first option.

You have two options:

Option 1

Enable VSA’s on the Ascend/Lucent MAX

This is by far the preferred method (as it solves many other problems).

Max6000/4000 Series TAOS with Menued Interface:

1.1. Go to Ethernet→Mod Config→Auth.
1.2. At the bottom of the menu, change Auth-Compat from OLD to VSA.
1.3. Save your changes, no reboot is needed.
2.1. Go to Ethernet→Mod Config→Acct.
2.2. At the bottom of the menu, change Acct-Compat from OLD to VSA.
2.3. Save your changes, no reboot is needed.

Max TNT/Apex 8000 Series TAOS with CLI:

nas> read external-auth
nas> set rad-auth-client auth-radius-compat = vendor-specific
nas> set rad-acct-client acct-radius-compat = vendor-specific
nas> write

Option 2

Enable OLD attributes in FreeRADIUS

One note on this, Ciscos have an Ascend compatibility mode that accepts only the OLD style Ascend attributes, just to make life more interesting. :)

You can make FreeRADIUS send the OLD style attributes by prefixing the Ascend attributes with X- in the raddb/mods-config/files/authorize file, sql table, ldap directory, attr_filter module, etc…

Thus the VSA Ascend attribute:

 Ascend-Data-Filter

becomes the OLD Ascend attribute:

 X-Ascend-Data-Filter