Authentication of multiple clients connected to the same port

Devices support 802.1X authentication for ports with more than one client connected to them. The following figure illustrates a sample configuration where multiple clients are connected to a single 802.1X port.

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Multiple clients connected to a single 802.1X-enabled port

If there are multiple clients connected to a single 802.1X-enabled port, the device authenticates each of them individually. Each client‘s authentication status is independent of the others, so that if one authenticated client disconnects from the network, it has no effect on the authentication status of any of the other authenticated clients. The number of clients supported at the system level is 255.

By default, traffic from clients that cannot be authenticated by the RADIUS server is dropped.