I do not have any radius server in my lab, nor do I have any hardware currently to accomplish this task. I needed a quick easy to deploy and enterprise-level RADIUS server solution that I can utilize to test 802.1X Authentication issues with MistAI and Marvis. I decided to look at some cloud-based providers and went with Jump Cloud.
RADIUS Configuration:
This took me about three to five minutes or less to configure. This is a simple PEAP-MSCHAPv2 deployment for testing. As far as I know Jump Cloud does not support EAP-TLS currently. Note: I will do a real quick overview of Jump Cloud instead of going into each and every feature that it offers in this post.
Step 1: Create user groups and assign RADIUS attributes
Step 2: Create users and assign them to a group.
Step 3: Define a RADIUS Server and assign groups
Configuring 802.1X SSID – Mist:
This is a straightforward and simple process, with some mandatory and some optional settings.
- SSID Name
- Security Type
- Define RADIUS Auth/Acct servers
Add some VLANs quick
Save and we are good to go. Let’s try to connect and see what happens. NOTE: This user is assigned to VLAN30 User Group in Jump Cloud so my IP should be from the 192.168.30.0/24 network.
iPhone
NOTE: I noticed that video went blank during screen recording and I had to type my password.
Jump Cloud – Activity Logs:
Jump Cloud offers some excellent user activity logs as compared to Microsoft NPS.
This is a quick snippet of a failure log:
Following picture shows a success log:
Here is a quick look at the connectivity in the Mist Dashboard:
I am able to see when the client failed Authorization and even look at the frame captures of the whole process. This gives me excellent advantage when trying to troubleshoot. I am also able to see the successful Authorization.
Few points I’d like to make here in the end:
- All this can be accomplished not only from the UI but using the APIs
- Juniper-Mist and Jump Cloud both offer APIs for configuration
- What is absolutely impressive here is that I can do all this without using any automation in 5 min.
- Using Python, yaml, csv files and automation I am able to configure 100’s of users, multiple sites, SSID’s VLANs etc utilizing Juniper-Mist APIs.
- Juniper-Mist make ease of deployment a reality.
- Stay tuned for the next post…