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