Radius or LDAP (not Oracle LDAP) authentication for GridControl

Question

I'm running GC 10.2.0.3.0 on Oracle Linux, and I'd like to be able to open up GridControl to other users without setting up accounts/passwords for them. Accounts I can handle, passwords, I don't want to handle.
I see that if I create a new GC user via enterprise manager, a new database accout is also created in the EMREP database. I've configured our EMREP database to use radius authentication and it works when I connect via sqlplus to the EMREP database. The user is set to authenticate "externally" and os_authent_prefix is set to ''.
However, after I set up external authentication for a given user, they are no longer able to login to enterprise manager using their radius authenticated password. So something about EM is not capable of radius authentication with the local EMREP database?
Questions for all:
Is it possible to authenticate users of enterprise manager GridControl against an external password store? I have at my disposal: radius (works great for several of our databases), ActiveDirectory (without oracle schema extensions), LDAP (active directory), proxying the EM server with another Apache server.
I do not have a license for OID and the "free use" license for OID does not allow for user management. We cannot we purchase OID for this purpose.
Our GC environment is Linux so Windows OS authentication against AD isn't going to work and we need to support Firefox/IE/Other browsers on various OS's.
I've seen hints that "external authentication" is possible with "generic" sources, but nothing concrete. Anyone doing this?

Answer 1

<QUOTE>All I want now is the capability to perform my own method of LDAP BIND to AD to be used as a security plugin to the database authentication piece</QUOTE>
Amen.
Right now, I've got an SR open on the radius authentication issue in GC. It took me a two weeks to convince the Oracle tech that I wasn't talking about getting Oracle to use OS authentication where OS users were authenticated by radius.
I've put about 40 actual work hours in on this issue, going so far as to deconstruct the EM install .jar files and trying to replace the JDBC drivers.
At this point I believe that it would be relatively easy for Oracle to add Radius authentication support to Grid control in their next big release (11g).
Doing so would involve replacing the 10g JDBC thin drivers with 11g JDBC thin drivers. The 10g thin jdbc drivers support advanced security encryption and checksums, but not the radius authentication. The 11g thin drivers DO implement the radius option as well as a full complement of encryption checksum types not supported in 10g. From there it should be a simple matter of the EM java login procedure/bean/servlet/jsp being able to set the thin driver to use the radius code in the jdbc layer.
The other option, which I haven't yet given up on would be to hack the EM code so that instead of using 10g thin drivers it uses 10g OCI jdbc (thick) drivers. The thick drivers support the radius authentication and encryption/checksum features natively, and the settings are controled by the sqlnet.ora file. I've got java code using those just fine. If only I could hack EM to use them.
In short, if I had access to the source, I could probably code this up in a week. Very frustrating.
I thought about trying the OID route, but as I said in my original post, we don't have a license. Even if I got it working, and it sounds like it doesn't really work, I can't justify spending $x00,000 for 10-15 dbas not to have to use dedicated accounts and passwords.
Normal user login to our 9i and 10g databases we have working with radius (backed by Active Directory). All we do is "create user xxxxxx identified externally;" and the user is good to go.
In short, I think EM GridControl is awesome. I manage 36 databases with it and I've solved problems in minutes that used to take hours or days. When I show it to some of our oracle "power users" they all want it, but they're all radius authenticated.
I'll keep the thread updated if I see results from our SR.