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



Hi,

> If you go by the assumption, as reality pretty much dictates, that
> RADIUS is not divorced from specific transport binding, then you should
> be very cautious to avoid creating a heck of a lot of confusion
> downstream from where we sit. For the last umpteen years RADIUS has been
> RADIUS. True we have caused all sorts of havoc with attributes, but that
> hasn't killed basic interoperability between RADIUS clients and servers.
> This new effort would kill that basic interoperability. Therefore you
> need to make very clear that the result of this work will NOT be
> interoperable with the massive world-wide deployment of RADIUS clients.

Well, if an implementation would do RadSec exclusively, and NOT listen on 
UDP/1812 as well, then yes, RADIUS clients would not be able to communicate 
with that implementation.

Reality however is that all the implementations so far can do both, UDP/1812 
and RadSec on TCP/2083, and are able to translate between both. Such 
implementations *are* interoperable with existing RADIUS clients.

Since this is a (sane) behaviour by all implementations so far, it might be 
wise to add an according note to the RadSec I-D that: if interoperability 
with standard RADIUS clients is required, the implementation also has to 
listen on UDP/1812 (I used to think that goes without saying, but it 
certainly doesn't hurt to put that sentence in there). I wouldn't want to 
mandate this for all implementations as a MUST though, since I can easily 
imagine proxy interconnections in a backend that have no business with NASes, 
and for such deployments it would just be an unnecessary burden to mandate 
listening in UDP/1812.

Greetings,

Stefan Winter

-- 
Stefan WINTER

Stiftung RESTENA - Réseau Téléinformatique de l'Education Nationale et de 
la Recherche
Ingenieur Forschung & Entwicklung

6, rue Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi
L-1359 Luxembourg
E-Mail: stefan.winter@restena.lu     Tel.:     +352 424409-1
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