RE: Meaning of "backward compatible" WAS RE: Consensus Call on RADEXT WG re-charter

["David B. Nelson" <dnelson@elbrysnetworks.com>]

Glen Zorn writes...

> > For transport items this basically means "uses RADIUS packet
> > formats defined in RFC 2865, 2866 and 5176" (although the
> > ports can be different).
> 
> So what you're saying is that two nodes can be unable to 
> communicate & still be "backward compatible"?

I don't think that's what was meant.

I think understand your position:

-- The use of UDP is mandated in RFC 2865.

-- Packets sent by clients over UDP to Port 1812, won't be received by a
server listening on TCP Port <TBA>.

An alternate point of view is that a RADIUS client or server implementation
doesn't need to change very much if the sockets that it opens are stream
sockets as opposed to datagram sockets.  The data flow, above the socket
layer, (i.e. the application PDU stream) is the same.  In that regard, the
RADIUS protocol specification relies upon, but does not include the socket
layer and all the layers below.



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