I wanted to write a document on how to import RADIUS VSA’s (vendor specific attributes) into cisco’s ACS SE (Solution Engine) appliance, the reason being that I couldn’t find any good examples on the net and cisco’s documentation just wasn’t clear enough.

My purpose was to use RADIUS authentication between a Nokia IPSO appliance such that users who access voyager or ssh get authenticated centrally; for RADIUS authentication to work your authentication server (in this case ACS) needs to supply the AAA client (in this can the ipso box) with a “return list attribute”. By default ACS doesn’t have the nokia attributes; to import attributes you need to get your hands on a dictionary file, for nokia ipso it’s /etc/nokia.dictionary - I’ve a copy here.