Re: RADIUS tests and improvements

On 1/3/23 04:11, Thomas Munro wrote:
> Here's a draft patch to tackle a couple of TODOs in the RADIUS code in auth.c.

Nice to see someone working on this! I know of one company which could
have used the configurable timeout for radius because the 3 second
timeout is too short for 2FA. I think they ended up using PAM or some
other solution in the end, but I am not 100% sure.

> [...] While adding
> the GUC I couldn't help wondering why RADIUS even needs a timeout
> separate from authentication_timeout; another way to go here would be
> to remove it completely, but that'd be a policy change (removing the 3
> second timeout we always had). Thoughts?

It was some time since I last looked at the code but my impression was
that the reason for having a separate timeout is that you can try the
next server after the first one timed out (multiple radius servers are
allowed). But I wonder if that really is a useful feature or if someone
just was too clever or it just was an accidental feature.

Andreas