AAA for Cisco MDS Switches

Question

I have configured Cisco ACS 4.0 (TACACS) with Windows AD for all Cisco MDS switches and it is working fine. But local "admin" access to the Cisco MDS switches via telnet is not working. At the same time , if I create a user with "network-admin" role locally, that works but not the default admin user.
Could anyone help me in this regard.

Answer 1

You have two options.
1. Configure an "admin" user in AD. (note that you don't have to use the account named admin, you can just as easily assign a local user with the network-admin role).One thing to note, is that you normally use this local account in case the tacacs+ or radius authentication server goes down.
You can have users configured locally and AD at the same time. If you are running AAA the default config is to check your AAA servers first, if they are not available, then to default to a local account
2. Configure your local network-admin role user and then specify that say console access is authenticated locally, while ssh and telnet is authenticated through tacacs. This will allow you to always get in with a local account through the console, while it will force SSH and Telnet connections to authenticate through the AAA servers.
You can find this option in Device Manager > Security > AAA > Applications
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