Re: Comments on reliable accounting draft (was RE: Strawman RADIUSEXT WG charter - Take Two)

[Barney Wolff <barney@databus.com>]

On Mon, Aug 25, 2003 at 11:21:40AM -0700, Glen Zorn wrote:
> 
> The draft also makes a couple of assumptions that are novel, at least to
> me.  Is it true that RADIUS clients regularly choose proxies based upon
> NAI or some other piece of authentication data?  The last time I
> checked, routing of RADIUS packets was the job of proxies, not clients,
> but I won't claim to be familiar with the state of the art.

A proxy is a client of whatever it sends the request on to.

> In
> addition, I was not aware that RADIUS proxies regularly implemented the
> timeout and retry algorithm.  If so, this seems like it would
> _increase_, rather than decrease network traffic.

A proxy can't just blindly forward the request unchanged, because
(at least) there may be id collisions.  Certainly the proxy I wrote
years ago took active responsibility for throttling, retry and
failover.  That meant, among other things, suppressing duplicate
requests if it was still working on the first attempt.  While this
was a violation of the end-to-end heuristic of system design, in the
particular situation we had control over the proxy code but not even
access to the client code.

"Network traffic" is not a useful concept; particular links, routers
and hosts may be congested, or not.

-- 
Barney Wolff         http://www.databus.com/bwresume.pdf
I'm available by contract or FT, in the NYC metro area or via the 'Net.

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