Re: New Technical Issues RE: WG last call in progress on VLAN/Priority Draft

["Alan DeKok" <aland@ox.org>]

Barney Wolff <barney@databus.com> wrote:
> It seems to me that what's wrong with the attribute is not so much
> whether it should be called integer or string, but that it is a
> misuse (or clever hack) of the tag field to have semantic value.

  But it's not a RADIUS tag field.  It's meaning has no correlation
with the tag fields of RADIUS tagged attributes, because those tags
have values 1..0x1f.  Instead, it's using a VLAN tag.

> That's clear from the allowed values of the first octet, 0x31 or
> 0x32.  So far as I'm aware, tags have only been used for grouping
> and ordering of attribute sets.  Here, what is manifestly
> a tag field is being used to communicate a 1-bit flag value.

  Perhaps calling it "VLAN flag" rather than "VLAN tag" would minimize
confusion.

> I don't even believe that the clever hack will work well, because it
> will allow undefined values (0x32 etc) to escape detection

  I'm not sure what you mean by that.

> and it will make the human-readable form of the attribute look
> misleading.

  That is certainly true.  That's the price to be paid for not having
a machine-readable data model.

  Alan DeKok.

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