Advantages of RADIUS

The diversity of hardware and operating systems in today's enterprise networks requires remote user authentication to be vendor independent and scaleable. RADIUS support in Windows 2000 facilitates this kind of user authentication, while providing highly scaleable authentication designs for performance and fault-tolerant designs for reliability. A RADIUS client is a remote access server that receives RADIUS authentication requests and accounting information that is then forwarded to a RADIUS server. Here's how RADIUS provides authentication and accounting services for distributed dial-up networking:

IAS performs RADIUS authentication and acts as a RADIUS server. IAS stores RADIUS accounting information from RADIUS clients in log files. You can install IAS during the installation of Windows 2000, or later through Add/Remove Programs in the Control Panel. In the Windows Components wizard, find IAS by selecting Networking Services, and then clicking Details.