RE: Issue: Zero Tag field in Filter-Rule attribute

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

Question:  In the interest of making it easier to enter in Filter-Rules as 
ASCII strings, does it make sense to make the Tag value 0x30 (The '0' 
character) the way to indicate that a filter rule is untagged, rather than 
NULL (0x00)?  My understanding is that there may not be an easy way to enter 
in a NULL character in an ASCII string within some RADIUS server 
implementations, whereas entering a '0' character is easy.

Here is the current text:

Tag

The Tag field is one octet, and MUST always be present. It is used to
identify the filter rule that is represented. Where a single
filter rule exceeds 253 octets in length, the rule MUST be encoded
across multiple NAS-Filter-Rule attributes, each with the same
non-zero Tag value; non-zero Tag values MUST be unique for each
filter rule present in a RADIUS packet. The value of zero (0) in
the Tag field indicates that the attribute contains a filter rule
that does not exceed 253 octets in length; as a result attributes
with a Tag value of zero MUST NOT be concatenated, and one or more
Filter-Rule attributes with a tag value of zero may be included
in a single RADIUS packet, each describing a single filter rule.

With the change, it might look like this:

The Tag field is one octet, and MUST always be present. It is used to
identify the filter rule that is represented. Where a single
filter rule exceeds 253 octets in length, the rule MUST be encoded
across multiple NAS-Filter-Rule attributes, each with the same
non-zero Tag value; non-zero Tag values MUST be unique for each
filter rule present in a RADIUS packet. The value of '0' (0x30) in
the Tag field indicates that the attribute contains a filter rule
that does not exceed 253 octets in length; as a result attributes
with a Tag value of 0x30 MUST NOT be concatenated, and one or more
Filter-Rule attributes with a tag value of 0x31 may be included
in a single RADIUS packet, each describing a single filter rule.



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