Before there was Taranac, there was tacacsgui.
For more than three years it was my project — a web GUI for TACACS+, built and maintained mostly on evenings and weekends. People ran it in real networks. It did an honest job, and I'm genuinely proud of it.
But if you build one thing for that long, you also collect a long list of “if I ever start over, I'd do this differently.” tacacsgui was TACACS+ and only TACACS+. I knew where the seams should be, where the policy engine wanted to live, how identity, NAC and a captive portal should hang off one core instead of being bolted on. I could see the whole thing — but a rewrite that big is a mountain, and I was one person with a day job. So the new architecture stayed where it was: in my head.
What changed isn't that I suddenly found the hours. It's that I found people to build it with — a bench of tireless assistants I can think out loud with, poke holes in the data model with, and then actually write the thing, exactly the way I'd been picturing it. The mountain didn't shrink. I just stopped climbing it alone.
So this is where tacacsgui goes: not abandoned, outgrown. Same instinct — make network access control something a human can actually reason about — but rebuilt from the core out, with room for RADIUS, 802.1X, identity, MFA, PKI and more, all deciding on one engine. New name to match the new shape: Taranac.
If you followed me here from tacacsgui — thank you. You backed the caterpillar. This is the butterfly, and it's finally out of my head and into code.