User's Manual

Fortress ES-Series CLI Guide: Mesh Point CLI and Administrative Access
15
indicates the amount of time to wait before allowing a login
after any failed login attempt.
NOTE: The lock-
out feature applies
exclusively to remote
logon attempts. Admin-
istrative access via a
physical connection to
the
Console port (Section
2.1.1) is never locked.
Locally authenticating administrators are permitted a maximum
of three failed logon attempts by default, but since permanent
lockout and lockout duration are both disabled by default,
administrators who exceed the maximum are not locked out.
Maximum failed logon attempts (
MaxAttempts ) can be set from
1 to 9. A non-zero lockout duration ( LockoutDuration ) will keep
the administrator locked out for the specified number of
minutes (
1 to 60). Alternatively, enabling “permanent” lockout
(
LockoutPermanent ), will keep the account locked until an
administrator logged on to an
administrator -level account
has unlocked it:
# unlock admin -name <adminUsername>
NOTE: A network
failure will cause a
Mesh Point, configured
for
radius administra-
tive authentication and
with
AccountAuth-
Failback enabled
,
to fail back to the
local
database of administra-
tive accounts, even when
the server being used is
the internal user authen-
tication server.
2.2.1.3 Authentication Method and Failback
By default, the Mesh Point authenticates administrators
through the local administrator database
(
AccountAuthMethod: local)—a designated service running
on the Mesh Point itself and separate from the authentication
service that the internal RADIUS server can be configured to
provide.
Alternatively, you can configure the Mesh Point to authenticate
administrators through a standard RADIUS server
(
AccountAuthMethod: radius): either a third-party RADIUS
or a Fortress RADIUS server running on a remote Mesh Point
or on the current Mesh Point.
The services available to authenticate administrators when
their authentication method is
radius are those configured for
the Mesh Point, using the
add auth and/or set localauth
commands (as described in Sections 4.5.1 and 4.5.2,
respectively). An account for the administrator to be
authenticated must be present on any RADIUS server(s) used
to perform the service (as described, for Fortress RADIUS
servers, in Section 4.5.3).
NOTE: Authentica-
tion failback has
no effect when the
administrator authenti-
cation setting is local
(the default).
When administrator authentication is set to radius, Fortress
strongly advises you to leave (or restore) the Mesh Point’s
default authentication failback setting of enabled
(
AccountAuthFailback: enable ). This permits the local
administrator database to be used to authenticate
administrators when no configured external RADIUS server is
unavailable.
If administrator authentication is set to
radius when
authentication failback is disabled, and the external service
becomes unavailable, all administrators will be locked out of
the Mesh Point until the RADIUS server connection has been
restored. Authentication failback is enabled by default.