ZyXEL Communications P-2612HNU-Fx Support Notes page 42

the Wireless client (supported 802.1x client or none-802.1x client) can always access
the network.
2. Force Unauthorized: Causes the port to remain in the unauthorized state, ignoring
all attempts by the client to authenticate. The authenticator cannot provide
authentication services to the supplicants through the port. While AP is setup as
Force Unauthorized, Wireless clients (supported 802.1x client or none-802.1x client)
never have the access for the network.
3. Auto: Enables the 802.1x and causes the port to begin in the unauthorized state,
allowing only the EAPOL frames to be sent and received through the port. The
authentication process begins, when the link state of port transitions from down to
up or when an EAPOL-start frame is received requests the identity of the client and
begins relaying authentication messages between supplicant and the authentication
server. Each supplicant attempting to access the network is uniquely identified by
the authenticator by using the client's MAC address. While the AP is setup as Auto,
only the Wireless client supporting the 802.1x client can access the network.
Re-Authentication
•
The administrator can enable the periodic 802.1x client re-authentication and
specify how often it occurs. When the re-authentication is time out, the
authenticator will send the EAP-Request/Identity to reinitiate authentication process.
In the ZyXEL Wireless AP 802.1x implementation, if you do not specify a time period
before enabling the re-authentication, the number of seconds between
re-authentication attempts is 1,800 seconds (30 minutes).
EAPOL (Extensible Authentication Protocol over LAN)
•
The authenticators and supplicants communicate with one another by using the
Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP and RFC-2284). The EAP was originally
designed to run over PPP and to authenticate the dial-in users, but the 802.1x
defines an encapsulation method for passing the EAP packets over Ethernet frames.
This method is referred to as the EAP over LANs, or EAPOL. Ethernet type of EAPOL
is 88-8E, two octets in length. The EAPOL encapsulations are described for IEEE 802
compliant environment, such as the 802.3 Ethernet, 802.11 Wireless LAN and Token
Ring/FDDI.
All contents copyright (c) 2010 ZyXEL Communications Corporation.
P2612HNU Fx Support Notes
42