[ale] Authentication for network access

[Dan Newcombe]

Here is one I'm stumped on. 

Is it possible to somehow have a person/machine authenticate itself before
gaining network access?

The options I've gone through in my mind:
	DHCP - you can limit what NIC's can get an IP, however, that
		requires magical knowledge of the NIC's before hand.  With
		4500 student notebooks, that is a lot of magic, but
		possibly not a bad price to pay for network access.

	PPPoE - thanks to peoples DSL trouble, I learned about this.
		While it sounds like PPP over an Ethernet wire, I am
		unsure what effect this would have on someone connecting
		to other networks - do drivers need to be loaded on a 9x 
		machine to use this?  Is there support for Mac's and
		NT/2000?  

Are there any other options?  One off-the-wall idea I had was some scheme
where they would get an IP, but only be able to get to one location - a
web server on which they would have to authenticate themselves, which
would then adjust some routing tables to allow that IP address to have
full access, but that just seems a bit iffy to me.

Ideas?  Preferably ones that I can somehow tie back to a Linux login
server for authentication (RADIUS/LDAP/pam_*)

Thanks!!!

	-Dan

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