If you’re managing your Cisco routers, switches, etc. using local accounts created on each device, you need to read this article. Being relatively new to the Cisco IOS myself, I get excited when I find a time saver such as this. It’s one of those things that I knew could be done, but just never took the time to investigate it. What I’m talking about it leveraging Active Directory as the authentication method into the Cisco IOS. So instead of creating and managing user accounts on the Cisco equipment, you can use the existing user accounts in AD. I’ll start by setting up and configuring the Internet Authentication Service, Microsoft’s version of a RADIUS server, in which the Cisco equipment will use to access AD for authentication.

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