[ale] Authentication for network access

[J.D. Forinash]

On Wed, Nov 29, 2000 at 11:40:59AM -0500, Dan Newcombe wrote:
> 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?  

We're doing something sort of like the former using a setup by Elastic 
Networks. In a nutshell, what it does is:

a) Issues a bogus IP address to new clients.
b) Intercepts http accesses from bogusly addressed clients.
c) hands back a login screen as a response to the http request

Once the login is done, it proceeds to

d) expire the bogus address and then 
e) issue a real address that can actually do something.

Basically, it cheats and uses DHCP twice. :)

I don't really know much more than that; I'm not the guru for that machine...

-JDF
--
J.D. Forinash                           ,-.       
Georgia Tech College of Computing CNS  ( <  	  
211 CCB; (404)-385-0391                 `-'
The more you learn, the better your luck gets.                
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