Installing and commissioning the server went well, but we did encounter a problem when starting the server for the first time because it expected the NT "Netlogon" service to be started on the machine. To authenticate against the Windows domain, the server had to be a member of the domain.
We were impressed by how SBR plugged into our Windows domain, letting the server authenticate individual users against their user profiles in the native database or against their group profiles. Setting up profiles and NAS devices on SBR was intuitive and flexible. We used profiles to set up check and reply attributes, then applied the profiles to users in the native database.
The enterprise version of SBR supports a host of authentication mechanisms, but lacks a few draft EAP types, such as SIM (Subscriber Identity Model), though SBR 4.7 should support EAP-SIM. SBR covers the gamut of back-end authentication sources, with the exception of Kerberos, and binds with NDS only through the LDAP interface. SBR runs on Windows as a service and is administered through a Win32 API-based custom management application.
We liked SBR's easy-to-use server administration and user-friendly interface. We didn't have to drill deep into various categories to configure the server, as we did with NavisRadius and Cisco's ACS, and the categories were easy to figure out. For example, we easily set up tunneling-based authentication for VPNs and firewalls, taking the complexity out of complex security interfaces. These tunnels enforce restrictions based on attributes, like NAS IP address, NAS type, number of concurrent sessions the tunnel can support and called-station ID. However, as with the other products we tested, we had to configure advanced settings, such as EAP definitions, using a text-based file that requires a server restart to enact changes.
We liked Funk's LCI (LDAP Configuration Interface), which let us administer SBR using LDAP commands. The LDAP schema is fixed because the LCI is a gateway/wrapper between the commands and the internal database. LCI also was used to link our external LDAP server with SBR. It facilitates binding with the Windows Domain when SBR runs on a workgroup machine.
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