Consensus Call: "Sense of the Room" at RADEXT WG meeting at IETF 66

["Bernard Aboba" <bernard_aboba@hotmail.com>]

At the RADEXT WG meeting at IETF 66, we took a "sense of the room" with 
respect to what the WG should do with respect to the exhaustion of the 
RADIUS standard attribute space.   A  consensus appeared to emerge.  We 
would now like to confirm that consensus on the RADEXT WG mailing list.

In your reply to this message, please state whether you support the 
consensus described below, or whether you disagree with it (and if so, how).

The "sense of the room" in the RADEXT WG meeting at IETF 66 was that:

* Exhaustion of the RADIUS standard attribute space is a problem that should 
be solved.
* RADEXT WG is the place to solve the problem.
* The attribute exhaustion problem should be the focus -- not adding other 
capabilities to RADIUS (such as support for the Diameter data types).

In reviewing the potential solutions to the problem, the people present at 
the meeting appeared to strongly favor a RADIUS extension approach such as 
that outlined by Lior & Li (RADIUS attribute extension), over the current 
proposals for adding Diameter AVP support to RADIUS (Wolff & Weber and 
Mitton proposals).  Some of the reasoning behind this was that adding 
support for Diameter AVP parsing and dictionary support would involve a 
substantial portion of the effort to develop a Diameter server, whereas 
simply adding support for an extended space vwould involve less effort, and 
would therefore be more likely to be deployed.

This consensus, if it is confirmed on the mailing list, has implications for 
the Design Guidelines document.  If the RADIUS attribute space is extended 
without changing the RADIUS protocol in other ways, then Design Guidelines 
document needs only to focus on guidelines for the RADIUS protocol.  Thus, 
the Design Guidelines effort is considerably simplified.



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