RFC 2866 clarifications

[Alan DeKok <aland@nitros9.org>]

  I've been having some discussions (public and private) with people
about RFC 2866 recently.  There are apparently disagreements about the
meaning of Acct-Input-Octets (and related attributes).  The following is
a summary of the discussion, based on specifications and references:

  RFC 2866
  http://freeradius.org/rfc/rfc2866.html#Acct-Input-Octets
   ...This attribute indicates how many octets have been received from
the port ...

  i.e. In a dial-up context, a user connects TO a port, which recieves
octets FROM that user.  This interpretation is validated by the
Livingston Portmaster documentation:


  Portmaster documentation:
  http://portmasters.com/tech/docs/radius/accounting.html
  ... Acct-Input-Octets records the number of bytes received from the
user ...

  Which appears to be clearer than the text in RFC 2866.  RFC 4005 also
defines Accounting-Input-Octets this way.


  Some more discussion, and a table of conflicting meaning by vendor:
  http://coova.org/wiki/index.php/Template:NASVendorAccountingTable


  3GPP Specification:
  http://www.3gpp.org/ftp/Specs/archive/29_series/29.234/29234-770.zip
  Table 4.5.1:

  Acc-Input-Octets: Indicates the number of octets sent by the WLAN UE
over the course of the session. According to IETF RFC 2866 [20], shall
only be present if ACC Status Type is set to "Stop".


  There appears to be some confusion over the meaning of this attribute,
and related ones.  Does this WG have consensus over the interpretation?
 Is additional clarification necessary?

  Alan DeKok.

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