Proposal for a Wireless Access authentication talk?

[Christopher Browne]

On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 10:18 PM, Jamon Camisso
<jamon.camisso-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On 12-08-08 05:39 PM, Christopher Browne wrote:
>> On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 5:32 PM, William Muriithi
>> <william.muriithi-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>>> Curious, any one here managed to configure their APs to authenticate
>>> through their centralized authentication system? (WP2)
>>>
>>> If so, mind offering a talk some day? describing the set up a bit, and
>>> what would be the painful section to watch out for?
>>
>> Hmm.  The Board has been musing about a "router night" for a while,
>> which has been looking like it's a series of small topics.
>> Centralizing authentication sounds like an interesting addition.
>> Certainly worth tossing onto the list.
>>
>> It still leaves open the question of who knows enough about it to talk
>> about it, but if the scope is drawn down to "You've got 30 minutes",
>> that might make it easier for someone to imagine themselves capable to
>> be the speaker.
>
> I'm no expert, but I could conceive of speaking about WPA2 + Freeradius
> given enough time to get a demo router flashed and create a presentation.

I have no doubt but that that the process of preparing an explanation
for others would help cement some bit of expertise.

If what you prepare is, "here are the 27 steps I went thru to do this;
do the same", that would frankly be boring and irritating.  (I do NOT
want to know 27 steps on how to set up WPA2+Radius!)  Distilling that
to get somewhat more abstract descriptions will be useful; listeners
will find "Why?" much more interesting than "What?"  And the number of
"Whys" should be fewer than the "Whats."  :-)

I notice one thing in looking at freeradius.org that I wanna gripe
about; it's a little too recursive.  "FreeRADIUS is a free RADIUS
server."  To which my retort is, "perhaps that should explain what
RADIUS is, and why I should care?"  (Their FAQ gets to the root of it,
but there should be a better up-front answer!)

Perhaps that even points towards a broader talk, along the lines of...
"Why you should consider setting up FreeRADIUS to handle centralized
authentication for various services, including for Linux users, WiFi,
databases, and more!"

But perhaps I'm being overambitious here.
-- 
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question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"
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