RE: SNMP vs. RADIUS transport mappings

["Glen Zorn" <glenzorn@comcast.net>]

owner-radiusext@ops.ietf.org <> scribbled on Tuesday, April 15, 2008
12:26 PM:

>> UDP transport is forever enshrined in RFC 2865, however; maybe
>> that's a bad thing, but it's true nonetheless.
> 
> How is this different from say, SNMP?

Here is the difference: RFC 1067, section 3.2.4 paragraph 2 says
"Consistent with the goal of minimizing complexity of the management
agent, the exchange of SNMP messages requires only an unreliable
datagram service, and every message is entirely and independently
represented by a single transport datagram.  While this document
specifies the exchange of messages via the UDP protocol [8], the
mechanisms of the SNMP are generally suitable for use with a wide
variety of transport services."  It would appear to me that SNMP was
designed _from the beginning_ with a variety of transports in mind; the
fact that all of the transports defined for the next 14 years or so were
connectionless  just says that the original choice was a good one.
Leaving aside the apologetics in section 2.4 of RFC 2865, contrast the
above quotation with section 3, paragraph 1 of that document: "Exactly
one RADIUS packet is encapsulated in the UDP Data field [4], where the
UDP Destination Port field indicates 1812 (decimal)."  Where is the
wiggle room, the opening for a flexible transport mapping in that
statement?  There is none, the statement is flat, inflexible and quite
specific.

> 
> The original transport mappings for SNMP (RFC 1089, 1906) were all
> datagram transports. 
> 
> The logic for SNMP over UDP was quite well enshrined.  For
> example, see the following discussion, which has some
> parallels with RFC 2865 Section 2.4:
> http://www.unix.org.ua/orelly/networking_2ndEd/snmp/ch02_01.htm
> 
> Yet, RFC 3430 defined SNMP over TCP:
> http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3430.txt
> 
> Normative references included the following:
> 
> Transport Mappings for SNMP:
> http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3417.txt
> SNMP applications:
> http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3413.txt
> An Architecture for Describing SNMP Management Frameworks:
> http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3411.txt
> 
> 
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> 
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