ACS 5.2 Multiple Active Directory Support

[dumlutimuralp]

Hi,

I couldnt seem to find a way to add multiple DCs to Cisco ACS 5.2 , all it requires in the ACS GUI is input the Domain Name ? Are we limited to add the root DC  /forest ?

I am not a Microsoft Expert ...

I also couldnt figure out how ACS finds the DC through this simple input ? Is it DNS aided ?

Comments are appreciated.

Dumlu

[Shaik Zubair · Accepted solution]

ACS 5 can be joined only to a single domain as of now. when acs is joined to a domain ACS can authenticate any user that belongs to that domain from Any Domain controller in that domain. It relies on DNS resolution to find the appropriate Domain controller.

I believe what your looking for is Multi domain authentication. if you want to perform this then you should have a bidirectional trust between the ACS immediate domain ( the domain of which ACS is a part of) the other domains. The ACS will send the authentication to the one of the domain controllers in its domain and this will be then forwarded to other domain. It could be either a child or a parallel domain but it needs to have 2 way trust between them.

Another way you could opt for is to configure 2 seperate domain controllers from different domains as LDAP servers. In this case we do not need any 2 way trust and you can seperately authentication request from each domain.

[dumlutimuralp]

Shaik,

Thank you. Appreciate it.