Specifications

OmniAccess Reference: AOS-W System Reference
364 Part 031652-00 May 2005
In an enterprise network, this capability can be used to authenticate users from
different organizational units. As an example, Acme Corporation may use
Windows Active Directory to store user information, and may authenticate
users in this network against Microsoft’s Internet Authentication Server.
Acme Corporation merges with Consolidated Widgets, Inc. which uses Novell
Directory Services (NDS) to manage the userbase. Depending on the size of
the two companies, it may take months or years to merge the IT infrastructure,
if it ever happens at all. For this company, realm-based selection of
authentication servers allows the users of both companies to use the same
network infrastructure while their identity information continues to be
managed by two different directory services. The figure below illustrates this
principle.
In service provider networks, the same access wholesaling described in the
previous section can be enabled by this feature with much greater scalability.
SSID-based authentication server selection described above permits up to 16
services on a given AP, limited by AP hardware. Domain or realm based
authentication server selection, on the other hand, allows nearly an unlimited