What does ACS do?

[amjbmr808]

My company just bought ACS along with WSLE. I don't know what either do. Can anyone expalin in simple terms? Also do we have to have a RADIUS server to work with the ACS?

Thanks in advance for the education!

[minie]

ACS or a radius server is needed for EAP authentication from clients, or LEAP authentication from infrastructure APs. WLSE is a solution to manage massive APs. WLSE to APs is just like Ciscoworks to Cisco devices. Furthermore, WLSE can do Radio Management. Check out following url.

http://www.cisco.com/go/swan

[gamccall]

ACS *is* your radius server (and tacacs server). When you're configuring your devices to authenticate against an external AAA server, the ACS is that server. Basically, it just maintains the lists of who is who and what they're allowed to do on your network.

The ACS is not a network management/monitoring device; all it does is give a thumbs up or thumbs down to auth requests from your network devices. For management, you have the WLSE, which is the CiscoWorks tool for managing your access points.

[d.beaver]

ACS is a Radius Server. It is the box that will handle authentication of your wireless devices on your network. If you are already doing authentication on your network with NT or Server 2003, you can copy that user database to ACS and not have to create to lists of users. If not, you can use that for your company as an authentication server.

It will also allow your wireless users the ability to use Cisco's EAP process called LEAP, or Light Extensible Authentication Protocol, which is the authentication of your wireless users, also known as 802.1X.

WLSE is a management tool for your access points. To prevent you from having to access each access point one after the other, it allows you to send changes and updates to all at one time. It also allows you to monitor all of your AP's to see their performance, if their working, and even detect if non-authorized AP's or clients are working on your wireless LAN.

There are many other features that both can do, but these are just the highlights.

Hope this helps.

David Beaver

dbeaver@ineteng.com